[Abundnce10]

> Over 170,000 people waited in the game’s lobby to play the HQ on Sunday night.

It seems like no easy feat to build out an app that streams live video as well as trivia questions/answers to 170k concurrent users. Does anyone have a guess at how they went about architecting a product like this?

[geofft]

I feel like I'd buy that in the short term - that's what VC money is for. (And perhaps in the long term too.) The hard part is the live streaming; sending <1 kilobyte of data to 170k concurrent users every few seconds isn't a fundamentally challenging problem (it's on the order of 1Gbps outbound traffic). YouTube has a live-streaming API I'd be inclined to build a proof of concept with and see how far that gets me; if not, a couple minutes of Googling finds me Ustream, owned by IBM, charging $99-$999/month for their "professional" tier, and Livestream (.com) charging $799 for their "enterprise" tier, with both having a call-us-if-you-need-more tier. That's cheap enough that you can fund the tech side on this on even just the old-school YC $20K until you have enough traction to do a better job of it.

[hilbertseries]

The livestreaming you just partner with a CDN who serves the content for you. Questions and answers for 170k concurrents users isn't super hard, just make sure your backing datastore is a horizontally scalable kv store. Any of the cloud providers can give you a datastore capable of this.

[arikr]

Side note: They have a lot of experience, as some of the co-founders also co-founded Vine.

[Gaelan]

They've had some technical issues, including some games that started ~60 minutes late.