Microsoft Azure Media Services Powered NBC's Record Breaking Super Bowl Live Streaming
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After the successful 2014 Olympic Winter Games live streaming partnership, Microsoft Azure Media Services once again became NBC Sports Digital as a technology partner for live streaming of Super Bowl event. They saw a record-breaking streaming of over 11 hours of content to 2.5 million unique users with a peak of 1.3 million concurrent viewers. With 800,000 average viewers per minute, NBC Sports Live Extra broke the previous streaming record by 52%, greatly surpassing the record set last year of 528,000 average viewers per minute.
Azure Media Services provided the live workflow backend for the event.
- Azure Media Services ingested streams directly to US East and US West datacenters and each feed was then dynamically packaged with ad markers to HLS and HDS formats to enable delivery across all of the most popular devices including iOS, Android, and Windows devices.
- To ensure 100% uptime we used a dual datacenter architecture with seamless failover and also had multiple active and passive streaming scenarios on hand for any eventuality causing playback interruption including natural events disrupting both US East and US West datacenters.
- While streaming this channel to over 800,000 average viewers per second, we leveraged under 10% of provisioned capacity – a testament to the exponential capabilities of live streaming in the cloud.
Read more about it here.
