Rugby World Cup final breaks DStv Now streaming records
Multichoice has said that the streaming load on DStv Now’s platform on Saturday 2 November – the day of the 2019 Rugby World Cup final – was its largest ever in Africa.
“It’s fair to assume that the load during the Final was the largest ever seen in Africa, with three times more peak concurrent viewers than in the first game and double the number who watched the 2018 football World Cup Finals,” said Niclas Ekdahl, CEO of Connected Video at MultiChoice.
“Over the course of the day we served more than half a million unique users.”
This culminated in a peak load of over 500Gbps, or 4,000GB per minute, which is also a DStv Now record in Africa.
MultiChoice said that the number of active DStv Now users is four times higher than it was in 2017, and the company does not see this growth slowing.
Streaming issues
Heavy loads on the DStv Now platform saw users unable to watch parts of Springbok matches earlier in the tournament.
“Live events are the single biggest challenge a streaming service like DStv Now can face, as the huge number of concurrent users not only puts our systems under unprecedented load, it also strains the systems of the companies downstream from our servers who deliver the stream to customers,” said Ekdahl.
“We were disappointed at the problems we experienced early in the tournament. We’d of course done load testing and provisioned plenty of capacity, but we didn’t anticipate how congestion in one specific system could cascade into others.”
Ekdahl said that he was proud of how MultiChoice’s engineering team had learned from the issue and reworked system architectures to ensure that customers were able to watch the World Cup final without issues.
“Our customers rightly expect systems to work, and in the face of record-breaking demand during the Final, DStv Now delivered the goods.”
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