Powering Cricket for a Billion: How Indian Streamers Scale Live Sports
"Live Streaming Tech For Scale" Newsletter Part 1
Hey Streamers 👋,
A warm welcome to the 82nd edition of the “Streaming in India” newsletter, your weekly news digest about streaming players, OTT trends, and analyses. If you are not already a subscriber, please sign up and join thousands of others who receive it directly in their inbox every Wednesday.
Agenda
The Scale of Live Sports Streaming in India
Building a Robust Delivery Infrastructure
Adaptive Streaming and Video Optimization
Coming Up Next Week on The Streaming Lab
And….Action!
Imagine tens of millions of fans tuning in at once to watch cricket on their phones and TVs. In India, platforms like JioHotstar [for the purpose of this newsletter it is important to mention that Jio + Disney+ Hotstar have merged; the Disney+ Hotstar infrastructure survived the merger and the app is now called JioHotstar (JioCinema was taken down] make this possible on a national scale. These services have shattered global streaming records – JioCinema drew over 32 million simultaneous viewers during the 2023 IPL cricket final, surpassing Hotstar’s previous 25.3 million record. Achieving this kind of scale isn’t just about internet bandwidth; it requires a technological orchestra behind the scenes. In this newsletter, we’ll explore how India’s top streaming platforms harness advanced tech – from AI to edge computing – to bring high-volume live sports to every corner of the country. We’ll break down their “secret sauce” for scalability, highlight key innovations (like automated highlights and real-time analytics), and even peek at some homegrown Indian tech players helping along the way. Let’s evaluate!
The Scale of Live Sports Streaming in India
India’s love of cricket (and sports in general) translates into massive online audiences. When a big match is live, millions join the stream within minutes. Disney+ Hotstar pioneered this phenomenon with IPL cricket, reaching record concurrencies (25 million+ viewers in a 2019 match). In late 2023, during the ICC Cricket World Cup, Hotstar even prepared to support up to 50–60 million concurrent streams by offering free mobile access to matches. JioCinema, a newer entrant at the time, took this to another level by streaming IPL 2023 entirely free in HD and even 4K. The result: concurrency records were broken and user engagement soared.
But with great scale comes great engineering challenges: how do you keep 50 million people watching without a hitch?
Key Challenges at Unprecedented Scale: Maintaining a smooth stream for each user means the platform must handle enormous spikes in traffic. For example, every time a boundary is hit or a wicket falls, millions might refresh the app or switch streams, causing traffic surges. Systems have to be ready for “micro-spikes” – a famous example being when MS Dhoni comes in to bat, traffic jumps suddenly. The platforms must also minimize latency (delay) so that live action is truly live, and ensure the stream quality adapts to each viewer’s network conditions. All of this must happen in real-time, under huge loads, with no second chances during a live match.
Building a Robust Delivery Infrastructure
To handle millions of viewers, Indian streaming platforms rely on a distributed, multi-layered infrastructure that brings the content closer to users and spreads out the load.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Edge Servers: Almost all OTT apps use CDNs – networks of servers spread across geographies – to cache and deliver video content from locations nearest to viewers. By storing popular content (like the live video segments) on servers at the “edge” of the network (in various cities and regions), they minimize latency and prevent any single server from getting overwhelmed. JioHotstar, for instance, employs a multi-CDN strategy: its backend has an in-house CDN load optimizer that dynamically chooses between multiple CDN providers, always routing viewers through the least congested path. This not only improves speed and reliability but also provides redundancy – if one CDN network faces an issue, another can pick up the slack. In fact, during IPL streaming, over 90% of content requests are served from cache rather than the origin servers, thanks to aggressive caching policies. Hotstar had a similar approach and even set up separate CDN domains for highly cacheable data (like live scores or stats) to ensure those could be served with minimal processing at the edge.
5G and Edge Computing: With the rollout of 4G and 5G networks in India, streaming platforms are also leveraging telecom edge computing. JioHotstar, being part of Reliance Jio, has an advantage here – Jio’s 5G network works in tandem with Jio’s own mobile edge computing (MEC) servers to deliver streams. During IPL 2023, Jio’s tech team noted that their True 5G network plus edge compute enabled new features like 4K resolution and multi-camera angle streams with very low latency for millions of users. In simpler terms, they place small data centers closer to cellular towers or local regions, so that a user’s request for the video doesn’t have to travel all the way to a central server – the nearby edge server can deliver the stream faster. This reduces lag and prevents network congestion, especially when everyone in one city is cheering and streaming simultaneously.
Cloud Infrastructure and Auto-Scaling: Almost all OTT apps run on scalable cloud architectures. Disney+ Hotstar had fully embraced cloud computing – it ran hundreds of instances in AWS (Amazon Web Services) for its backend during peak events, and it was one of the first to use Kubernetes (K8s) containers at this massive scale (they boldly migrated to K8s in 2019 to handle IPL loads). Kubernetes allows them to orchestrate thousands of microservice instances efficiently. But interestingly, they discovered early on that typical “auto-scaling” (spinning up new servers automatically when load rises) wasn’t fast enough for sudden cricket traffic spikes. Pre-planning and manual scaling is crucial – Hotstar’s team would model expected traffic for a big match and ensure the needed servers and database capacity were already up and running ahead of time. Jio follows a similar approach: they coordinate with cloud providers months in advance to secure extra capacity and do dry-run simulations of 20 million+ users so that everything is provisioned before the first ball is bowled.
Operational Insight: During the 2023 World Cup, Hotstar actually redesigned parts of its backend to handle an expected doubling of traffic. They split their backend services across multiple Kubernetes clusters and even migrated to managed services (like Amazon’s managed Kubernetes, EKS) to improve reliability. By doing so, they removed bottlenecks like overloaded network gateways and spread the traffic across regions and clusters. This kind of “capacity engineering” ensured that when tens of millions of fans came online, the system scaled out smoothly rather than hitting a wall.
Load Balancing and “Panic Modes”: A crucial part of the infrastructure is smart load balancing – distributing user requests evenly across servers and data centers. Sophisticated algorithms direct incoming viewers to various servers so that no single origin gets too hot. And when there’s an unforeseen surge, the platforms have creative fail-safes. JioCinema, for example, designed a “Panic Mode” for extreme spikes. In this mode, they have pre-captured snapshots of less-critical data (like a match scorecard or menu info) stored as static content. If suddenly 5 million extra people open the app when a big moment happens, the system can temporarily serve some data (say, the latest score) directly from cached snapshots via the CDN instead of hitting the database in real-time. This way, the video keeps playing without stutter, and the app doesn’t crash even if the backend is momentarily strained. It’s like having a backup read-only copy of certain info to show users, buying time for the core systems to catch up.
Reliability Through Redundancy: Live sports leave no room for downtime. Thus, redundancy is built into each layer. Multiple CDNs, multiple cloud regions, and mirrored services are employed so that even if one component fails, the stream stays alive. For instance, Disney+ Hotstar’s setup uses two separate availability zones and even two parallel Kubernetes clusters during IPL – so much so that by 2023 they were managing over 8000 CPU cores and 16 TB of RAM in their cloud just to serve the cricket fans! The philosophy is simple: “The video must play!”. Other nice touches include increasing client-side caching (so apps don’t keep pinging the server unnecessarily) and using robust load testing. In fact, these companies often share their learnings publicly – Hotstar and JioCinema tech leads frequently speak at industry events (like Kafka Summit, etc.) about how they architect for zero downtime. This openness helps them attract talent and also validate their approaches against global best practices.
Adaptive Streaming and Video Optimization
Delivering video to such a wide audience means accounting for different devices and internet speeds. One viewer might be on a high-speed fiber Wi-Fi, another on a spotty 3G mobile network. The magic that makes streaming work for everyone is Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming.
Adaptive Bitrate Streaming: JioCinema and Hotstar both use ABR, which essentially creates multiple versions of the live video at different quality levels (say, 240p, 480p, 720p, HD, 4K, etc.). The streaming app can automatically switch between these based on the user’s current bandwidth and connection quality. If your network slows down for a moment, the app will temporarily play a slightly lower-resolution stream to avoid buffering, then jump back up to HD when the connection improves. This dynamic adjustment is seamless and crucial in a country like India where many viewers watch on mobile networks that can fluctuate. Thanks to ABR, even someone with a modest data connection can enjoy the match live (just maybe not in full HD), while those with good connectivity get crystal-clear streams – all from the same platform.
High Definition and 4K: One of JioCinema’s big moves in 2023 was streaming IPL in 4K Ultra HD – a first for Indian OTT at such scale. To do this, they had to ensure the encoding and delivery pipelines were efficient, because 4K video is extremely data-heavy. JioCinema’s engineers used advanced video encoding techniques to compress 4K video effectively without losing quality. This includes modern codecs and likely fine-tuned encoder settings that balance quality with bitrate. Moreover, because only some users would actually select 4K (which needs a very fast connection), the platform could monitor demand and scale the 4K stream bandwidth on the fly. Meanwhile, Hotstar also started offering select events (like English Premier League football) in 4K in 2024, reflecting an industry trend to push the envelope on video quality.
AI-Powered Video Optimization: One really interesting development has been the use of AI to reduce data consumption for streaming. In late 2024, Disney+ Hotstar announced a new AI-driven video encoding feature that can maintain the same visual quality while using less data. Essentially, AI algorithms analyze the video content frame-by-frame to see where they can compress more efficiently – for example, smoothing out backgrounds or reducing detail in scenes where the viewer wouldn’t notice it – and adapt the bitrate accordingly. Hotstar claims this cuts data usage by about 25% for viewers without affecting what they see. This is a big deal in India, because many users have limited data packs. It means a fan could watch more matches on the same data budget. The AI considers scene complexity (fast motion vs static scenes, dark vs bright scenes) and even user consumption patterns to optimize encoding in real time. While the exact techniques are proprietary (and even pending patent), it’s an example of using machine learning to enhance streaming efficiency. In practice, it could translate to smoother streaming in low-bandwidth conditions and quicker video downloads for offline viewing. As Hotstar’s Head of Technology put it, they managed to improve “watch time per GB” by over 12%, letting people get more cricket for the same data cost.
Low-Latency Protocols: Both platforms have been experimenting with reducing latency – the delay between the live action in the stadium and what you see on your screen. Traditional streaming (HLS or DASH protocols) can often be 30-60 seconds behind live TV. Newer low-latency streaming protocols and tweaks (like Low-Latency HLS/CMAF) are being adopted so that online viewers aren’t too far behind the real score. JioCinema’s team indicated they use such protocols to get as close to real-time as possible. During IPL 2023, many fans noted that JioCinema’s stream was only a few seconds behind the TV broadcast – a big improvement from earlier years. This involves tuning how the video segments are created and buffered. It’s a technical tightrope: smaller buffer means lower latency but also less room for error if someone’s network jitters. Through a mix of app optimization and edge delivery, they seem to have found a sweet spot where you can watch the last-ball thriller almost live on the app, and perhaps even participate in predictions without spoilers.
Hotstar was an early pioneer in massive live sports streaming. By 2019 it had 25 million concurrent IPL viewers and interactive features like “Watch’N Play” (a live play-along game for fans). This set the stage for the tech battles to come.
Coming Up Next Week on The Streaming Lab:
Behind the Scenes of India’s Biggest Sports Streams [Part 2]
India’s sports streaming platforms don’t just deliver live video — they run AI-powered, real-time systems capable of handling 50M+ concurrent viewers. Next week, we unpack the tech brains behind it all.
Real-Time Streaming Intelligence
How JioCinema and Hotstar use AI-powered telemetry to detect and fix issues during a match, not after.
Personalization at Scale
Machine learning tailors content feeds, languages, and overlays for millions of viewers — all in real time.
AI-Powered Highlights
Platforms like VideoVerse auto-generate match highlights and push clips to social within minutes.
Gamified Viewing Experiences
Hotstar’s Watch’N Play handled over 1 million user predictions per second without lag.
Smarter Scaling with AI & Edge
From panic-mode caching to DRM key delivery — AI and edge systems keep the stream smooth and secure.
The Indian OTT Tech Backbone
Startups like picoNETS and VideoVerse are quietly powering India’s streaming revolution behind the scenes.
Sources
Manish Singh, TechCrunch – “Reliance’s JioCinema breaks world record with free cricket streaming” (May 29, 2023)techcrunch.comtechcrunch.com
Abhinav CV – “Behind the Scenes: How JioCinema Streams IPL to 20 Million+ Fans” (Medium, 2023)medium.commedium.com
Disney+ Hotstar Tech Blog – “Scaling Infrastructure for Millions: Challenges to Triumphs” by Ajay Choudhary (Oct 2024)blog.hotstar.comblog.hotstar.com
Prachi Kothiyal – Talent500 Engineering Blog: “JioCinema’s IPL Streaming Technology Explained” (Dec 16, 2024)talent500.comtalent500.com
ETTelecom – “Ongoing IPL a use case of Jio True 5G network: SVP” (Apr 21, 2023)telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com
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