Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nonameiguess 583 days ago
There's no way 300 million people watched this, especially if that number is representing every Netflix subscriber. The largest claimed live broadcast across all platforms is last year's Super Bowl with 202 million unique viewers for at least part of it, but that includes CBS, Nickelodeon, and Univision, not just streaming audiences. Its average viewers for the whole game was 123 million, which is second all-time to the Apollo 11 moon landing.
1 comments
vitus 583 days ago
FIFA claimed the 2022 World Cup final reached 1.5 billion people worldwide, but again that seems like it was mostly via broadcast television and cable.

As far as single stream, Disney's Hotstar claimed 59 million for last year's Cricket World Cup, and as far as the YT platform, the Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing hit 8 million.

100 million is a lot of streams, let alone 300. But also note that not every stream reaches a single individual.

And, as far as the 59 million concurrent streams in India, the bitrate was probably very low (I'd wager no more than 720p on average, possibly even 480p in many cases). It's again a very different problem across the board due to regional differences (such as spread of devices, quality of network, even behavioral differences).

link
ta1243 582 days ago
480p30 could be as high as 280mbit or as low as 280kbit. Same with other resolutions.
link
vitus 582 days ago
I mean, yes, but nobody streams RAW video in practice, and I can't imagine any users or service providers who'd be happy with that level of inefficiency. In general, it's safe to assume some reasonable compression (which, yes, is likely lossy).
link
ta1243 582 days ago
It's quite possible for one broadcasters 480p30 to be a higher bitrate than another broadcasters 720p60

I remember watching the last season of Game of Thrones on one streaming provider, which topped out about 3.5mbit but claimed it was "1080p".

Give me a 15mbit 640x480 over 3.5mbit of 1920x1080 for that type of material any day.

link
vitus 582 days ago
> It's quite possible for one broadcasters 480p30 to be a higher bitrate than another broadcasters 720p60

Yes, I don't think anyone's disputing that.

> I remember watching the last season of Game of Thrones on one streaming provider, which topped out about 3.5mbit but claimed it was "1080p".

Why the scare quotes? That's a perfectly reasonable bitrate using modern compression like H.265, especially for a TV show that's filmed at 24 fps.

link