India's Hotstar Sets New Benchmark With Streaming Record, Draws Over 10M Concurrent Viewers To a Cricket Match (medium.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: An Indian on-demand streaming service, with fewer than 400 employees, has pulled off a milestone that Silicon Valley companies Facebook, Amazon and Google-owned YouTube can only dream about at the moment. On several occasions Sunday evening, more than 10 million viewers simultaneously tuned in to Hotstar, the largest on-demand streaming service in India, to watch the deciding match of the 11th edition of Indian Premier League cricket tournament. The real-time concurrent views, displayed publicly on Hotstar's website, peaked at 10.7 million, the highest any online streaming service has reported to date. It's a big milestone for Star India-owned Hotstar, which first broke the previous top record -- about 8 million concurrent views -- in the first qualifier match in the same cricket tournament last week. In 2012, YouTube reported that its platform saw about 8 million concurrent views on the live-stream of skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumping from near-space to the Earth's surface.

Comments

Still a marginal result

[LordHighExecutioner]

Most viewed TV shows in the world scored about 1 billion of viewers, i.e. 100 times more than this. Furthermore, none of them could be traced through an IP address.

Re:Still a marginal result

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair point. But what makes this Indian company's milestone impressive is the concurrent viewers it drew. YouTube's highest is at about 8 million -- and that too it set in 2012. Since then the company has struggled to grow past 5 million mark. YouTube is also very much free, Hotstar is not. You would have had to subscribe to a paid plan to be able to watch that cricket match.

Re:Still a marginal result

[Joce640k]

Fair point. But what makes this Indian company's milestone impressive is the concurrent viewers it drew.

Also the minor detail that this is Internet streaming, not radio broadcasting. Broadcasting radio waves to a lot of people isn't very difficult.

I know, little details like that are easy to miss...

Re:Still a marginal result

[TeknoHog]

Yes, but that was a TV broadcast, not concurrent streaming. This is an entirely different scaling challenge.

It's also idiotic and backwards, especially given that IP networks are capable of multicast/broadcast but those features are never used. Instead, it is considered a great success when a company can send a bazillion identical copies on separate streams.

It is doubly idiotic when done over cell networks -- remember when radio telephony was mainly used in emergencies at remote locations? Radio broadcast stations don't choke if there's a metric shitload of listeners in a small area.

Add to this media companies that want their subscribers to stream every time they want to listen/watch something, instead of keeping local copies. Well, at least it means faster/cheaper Internet for us dinosaurs.

Re:Sounds like a lie

[msmash]

Akamai seems to corroborate the 8-million figure, which Hotstar reached on Tuesday. (They reached the 10-million figure on Sunday.)