On: FIFA 2014 World Cup live stream architecture

[robinhowlett]

Seems like quite a complex solution for 500,000 concurrent users.

Why not just use Akamai for RTMP ingest and delivery? From my experience they can do all that was described and at scale.

[dreampeppers99 → robinhowlett]

Please keep in mind that FIFA14 was one event, we still broadcast many other events and channels simultaneously ( private and public).

About why chose HLS over RTMP, in our experiments HLS showed to be easier to scale than RTMP (maybe because the latter is stateful + the current players don't have an optimized adaptive bitrate algorithm + it's easier to scale http over rtmp)

[robinhowlett → dreampeppers99]

Yes agree, but Akamai can also transcode and repackage to HLS. We've used this at SportsLabs[1] to stream tens of thousands of sports events.

[1] http://sportslabs.com/

[dreampeppers99 → dreampeppers99]

+ iOS devices won't play RTMP.

[xai3luGi → robinhowlett]

NIH syndrome.

[dreampeppers99 → xai3luGi]

I disagree (maybe with a little context you will do understand):

  * We were only allowed to broadcast to Brazil.

  * We already have all the servers and needed bandwidth, why would you pay when you already have all the servers?