We entered a wider beta at Thanksgiving, midway through the NFL season last year and I immediately collected a lot of ‘data’ about my designs as the service scaled up from 3-4 concurrent users to dozens and everything melted down. After many adjustments I was able to scale up and could handle 65 concurrent viewers for the Super Bowl. We’ve continued to make improvements and I think the quality of the service has visibly improved. Thousands of people watched the NBA post season and the Olympics over the summer.
How many people have signed up recently? The first spike you see is for the NBA finals, the second spike is for the Olympics. There are now around 3000 users.
I measure viewership in streaming minutes. This is how much people are watching a channel. We count one viewer watching for 5 minutes as 1 unit for these graphs. This is what the NBA finals looked like.
Sporting events like the NBA and NFL provide bursts of activity. The olympics were different. Since NBC broadcast everything all day, it was a long term sustained level of traffic unlike anything I’ve seen.
Overall we have been able to handle both one time spikes and also sustained traffic. Looking forward, we will work to reduce stalling as much as possible. We will also switch to a kubernetes cluster that will hopefully allow us to both reduce costs and scale up even more. There is also a plan to add more tuner hardware for metv toons and WGBX.