MICAH STEPHENS
Concurrency Spikes Are Brutal
Netflix’s Tyson vs. Paul live stream showed how fast a giant SVOD can attract a huge audience with about 60 million people watching the live stream. This is leagues beyond Netflix’s on-demand loads. The live stream had to be ingested, transcoded and pushed to viewers in real time. Netflix admitted the stream “had our buffering systems on the ropes”.
I’m often hired to watch an event stream live, so that I can catch buffering issues, check the average bitrate, and concurrency. My clients hire me for proactive observability, not post-mortem log-digging.
Even if you don’t have Netflix-scale budgets, you can still dodge the Tyson-vs-Paul “spinning-wheel” fiasco. The recipe is to simulate the spike before it happens, spread traffic across more than one CDN, right-size the ABR ladder, and watch in real-time.
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