I’ve been testing the Super Bowl LX stream on Sunday, starting with the pre-game stream at 1pm, across more than 25 devices and platforms, documenting video quality, latency, and other technical metrics. You can jump here for my latest comments during the game. (2025 Super Bowl blog post here)

During the game, I am monitoring Reddit boards for Peacock, Fire TV, YouTube TV, Roku, and others, as well as Twitter hashtags, to see what viewers are saying about their streaming quality. I’m also talking to a few ISPs in the U.S. who provide me with details on the traffic they are seeing across their networks. Jump here for a list of all the platforms and devices I am testing.

[And that’s a wrap! While it will be a few days before we have detailed viewership numbers, NBC Sports and Peacock executed what I would consider a near-perfect Super Bowl stream. And it’s important to highlight that while producing a Super Bowl is already hard work, NBC Sports did so while also producing the Winter Olympics, with 17 hours of programming straight. Kudos to the entire NBCU/Peacock team. Many will get no rest as a week from today, NBC Sports will produce the NBA All-Star Weekend onsite in Los Angeles.]

NBC Sports’ stream of Super Bowl LX requires a Peacock Premium plan and is available on the NBC Sports website and app, with authentication via pay-TV credentials. Peacock doesn’t offer free trials, so anyone who wants to stream the Super Bowl on Peacock will need to pay for an account or, in the U.S., have YouTube TV, Sling TV, DirecTV,  or Hulu + Live TV. Fubo is currently in a carriage dispute with NBCU, so the game won’t be on Fubo. The game is also available via OTA and will be broadcast on Telemundo and Universo. Outside the U.S., NFL Game Pass is offered via DAZN, and users can stream the Super Bowl for just £0.99. If there is anything you want me to test during the game, please put it in the comments on this LinkedIn Post.

Tech Specs
The Peacock stream is in “upscaled” 4K HDR; it is not native 4K, and I see many news outlets reporting it is in “true 4K HDR,” implying it is being captured in 4K when it isn’t. Also, this is not the “first time” the Super Bowl has been in upscaled 4K. I understand why some people are reporting that online, since, unlike the broadcast world, where there is a standard, streamers all define 4K differently. The NBC Sports press release was very clear when it said, “This marks the first time a Super Bowl and Olympic Games will be presented in 4K HDR on the NBC broadcast network and the Peacock streaming service.” It’s the first time on NBC’s platform that BOTH events are offered in upscaled 4K HDR, not the first time an “upscaled” 4K Super Bowl stream has been offered.

NBC Sports has deployed 22 mobile units from NEP Group, 145 cameras, 130 microphones, 75 miles of cable, and a team of more than 700 employees on-site. NBC’s contribution feed is 1080p 59.94 fps PQ with 5.1. and international partners are getting the same, but in HLG. Dolby is also upscaling the audio to Dolby Atmos, but not all devices support 4K and Atmos. You can see a list of all currently supported devices here. Akamai, CloudFront, Fastly, and Netskrt are delivering the video for Peacock, and Akamai, CloudFront, and Fastly are delivering the video for DAZN outside the U.S.

Encoding:

• MPEG-DASH stream using CMAF-packaged fragmented MP4 with AES-CTR Common Encryption and multi-DRM (Widevine + PlayReady), protected by session-scoped CDN access tokens
• MPD manifest provides a 2-hour DVR window
• HD stream encoding bitrate ladder:
  • 512×288 ~350 kb/s
  • 768×432 ~860 kb/s
  • 960×540 ~1.85 Mb/s
  • 960×540 ~3.0 Mb/s
  • 1280×720 ~4.8 Mb/s
  • 1920×1080 ~7.8 Mb/s
  • 1920×1080 ~10 Mb/s
  • Audio: AAC-LC stereo 48 kHz ~128 kb/s
  • Audio: E-AC3 (Dolby Digital Plus) 5.1 ~384 kb/s
• 4k stream encoding bitrate ladder:
  • 640×360 ~500 kb/s
  • 960×540 ~1.0 Mb/s
  • 1280×720 ~2.5 Mb/s(59.94 fps)
  • 1920×1080~5.8 Mb/s(59.94 fps)
  • 3840×2160 ~10.0 Mb/s(59.94 fps)
  • 3840×2160 ~13.0 Mb/s(59.94 fps)
  • Audio: AAC-LC stereo 48 kHz ~128 kb/s
  • Audio: E-AC3+JOC Dolby Atmos 5.1.4 ~640 kb/s

Latency Testing Results
For latency testing, I ran the test 10x per device and app/platform and compared the results to the OTA feed from two antennas. Note that many factors affect the latency viewers experience, so my experience may not be representative of other users. Here’s the latency I saw across devices and platforms:

• Testing across three different illegal IPTV services averaged 58 seconds behind the OTA feed
• Sling TV app on Fire TV (ethernet): 59.4 seconds average behind the OTA feed
• Hulu+ Live TV app on Fire TV (ethernet) averaged 34.2 seconds behind the OTA feed
• DIRECTV on Fire TV (ethernet) averaged 52.8 seconds behind the OTA feed
• YouTube TV on Fire TV (ethernet) averaged 28.3 seconds behind the OTA feed
• NFL+: Didn’t test

*I’ll add latency testing from YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, DIRECTV and NFL+ shortly.

Live Updates During The Game

10:37pm: NBCU says they had a rebuffer rate of 0.07% for the Peacock stream.

10:15pm: With the 2-minute warning, NBC Sports and Peacock executed what I would consider a near-perfect Super Bowl stream. My thanks to NBC Sports for help with some of the tech specs, and to others who provided details about their experience.

9:22pm: It’s the end of the third quarter, and all is still looking good with Peacock’s stream. Two ISPs tell me traffic on their network looks good, with an average bitrate of about 8.5 Mbps. It’s not record traffic for them, though, nor would we expect it to be, since the Peacock stream is not free, as it was last year on Tubi and FOX.

8:28pm: It seems that bad bunny is confusing Peacock’s English subtitling option.

8:20pm: I love that Peacock is giving viewers the option to catch up on key plays if you don’t want to watch the halftime show.

8:07pm: Added latency testing results across three different illegal IPTV services, which averaged 58 seconds behind the OTA feed. Sling TV app on Fire TV (ethernet) averaged 59.4 seconds behind the OTA feed. Hulu+ Live TV app on Fire TV (ethernet) averaged 34.2 seconds behind the OTA feed

7:35pm: Across Twitter, monitoring Peacock hashtags since kickoff, I see a dozen complaints about stream quality, but none have provided any useful details. Complaints are to be expected for any live stream, but no major issues are being reported in any large volume. The stream is looking great. I do see one user complaining about getting a message saying they need to update their app, and says that Peacock should not be rolling out app updates during the Super Bowl, which they did not do. Many complaints during live events are “user issues” rather than problems with the stream itself.

7:11pm: DAZN’s stream of Super Bowl LX, available to NFL Game Pass subscribers outside the US for just £0.99, looks good. DAZN is taking the NBC international feed in 1080p at 59.94 fps HLG with 5.1, and streaming it in 1080p HDR, not upscaled 4K. I am streaming the DAZN feed in the U.S. using their Swedish app, with their help. You can see the tech specs and full review here.

6:54pm: Peacock stream looks VERY good across Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, and iOS devices for me. Colors are perfect, and the upscaled 4K looks great and is not washed out.

6:40pm: I’m testing Peacock’s Super Bowl LX stream over a SpaceX Starlink Mini, and it’s not great. I’m getting 265 Mbps down and 22 ms latency. On an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2nd Gen, AFTKRT), there is significant buffering, and I never get more than 2.96 Mbps of throughput. The stream averages 28 seconds behind OTA. The Starlink app shows that I have no obstructions and that the dish is perfectly aligned. This is the first time I have tested Starlink for streaming video from an OTT service. I am curious to hear what others have experienced with a Starlink Mini, so please share your experience in the comments on this LinkedIn post.

6pm: Kickoff is supposed to be at 6:30pm. Starlink is downloading a software update, and then I will also have details on how the stream works over Starlink.

For reference, here is a breakdown of streaming viewership for previous Super Bowl webcasts, but don’t go by the graphic alone. There are many differences across the years in how viewership was measured. See this post for a complete breakdown: Super Bowl Streaming Viewership Numbers From 2014-2025.

For the 2025 Super Bowl, FOX reported a rebuffer rate of 0.5%, a 28% share of viewership in 4K, and peak CDN capacity of 135 Tbps. You can see a detailed post-event breakdown of their workflow here: FOX Technical Presentation Details the Super Bowl LIX Streaming Video Stack

Here’s a breakdown of what I will be testing, along with more details on my setup:

• ISPs: Starlink, Verizon (500 Mbps), Optimum (300Mbps)
• OTA: Channel Master FLATenna and Mohu Leaf 50 TV antennas
• Platforms: Peacock, Sling TV, YouTube TV, NFL+, Hulu + Live TV, DirecTV, DAZN (Google AI says Fubo will have the game, but they won’t due to the carriage dispute. Another AI fail.)
• Devices: Fire TV Stick/Cube (AFTMA08C15/AFTKM/S3L46N/K3R6AT/K2R2TE/GA5Z9L/A78V3N), Roku (3821X2, 3940X2, 4800, 3820, 3820CA2) Apple TV (A2843/A2169/A1842), DIRECTV Gemini (P21KW-500), iPads (6x different models), MacBooks (4x, all 2022 and newer), iPhone (14/15 Pro/16 Pro Max)
• TVs: LG (55C9AUA/65BXPUA/65NANO80T6A), Samsung (UN40F5500AF/QN65S90CAFXZA/QN1EF), Vizio (V4K65M-0804/V4K55M-0801), TCL Roku TV (65S451)
• All devices with ethernet or a supported ethernet adapter are being used, all other devices are on wifi
• Every device is running the lastest app and OS version available

Note: For those who have asked, I am not getting paid by anyone to cover the Super Bowl stream. I have done this for each Super Bowl since 2015.

I’m testing DAZN’s stream of Super Bowl LX, available to NFL Game Pass subscribers outside the US for just £0.99, and the stream looks great. DAZN is taking the NBC international feed in 1080p at 59.94 fps HLG with 5.1, and streaming it in 1080p HDR, not upscaled 4K. I am streaming the DAZN feed in the U.S. using their Swedish app, with their help. Here’s details on the encoding specs:

• The HDR10 ABR ladder peaks at 1080p 59.94fps 8mbps HEVC main10 level 4.1. The HDR10 ladder has 29.97fps in the lower profiles under 3 Mbps.
• The SDR ABD ladder peaks at 1080p59.94 8mbps AVC high profile level 4.2. The SDR ladder has 29.97fps in the lower profiles under 3 Mbps.
• Surround sound in Dolby 5.1: Two EAC-3 profiles at 256kbps and 192kbps
• Stereo: Two AAC-LC profiles in 128kbps and 64kbps

DAZN is acquiring NBC’s feeds for the pre-game, game, halftime and post-game coverage in HDR 5.1 and SDR 5.1 via Encompass in Atlanta, which are then on-passed to DAZN’s regional production facilities worldwide for German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Japanese commentary, and delivered to select local markets via the DAZN app. DAZN’s playout facility uses Amagi for real-time graphics, promos, and ad insertion and the OTT streams are generated by M2A Media and Mediakind in 1080p 59.94fps HDR10 with Dolby 5.1 and 1080p 59.94fps SDR with stereo.

Akamai, CloudFront, and Fastly are delivering the stream across 200+ territories, with DAZN’s monitoring facilities in Leeds, Bangor and Hyderabad monitoring the feeds end-to-end.

Thanks to DAZN for setting up my account so I could watch the stream and test across devices.

*The photo is taken with my iPhone, and does not represent the actual quality of the video stream that viewers receive.

Privately held CDN and infrastructure provider Gcore, headquartered in Luxembourg, is allowing me to disclose some of its financial figures, which show significant revenue growth over the past two years. The company ended 2025 with $140 million in revenue, of which CDN-specific revenue was $27 million.

From November 2024 to November 2025, CDN revenue grew month over month by close to 55%. The company said that over the past two years, it had reduced CDN pricing in some regions, but strong demand and new large customers drove rapid traffic growth, making streaming one of Gcore’s fastest-growing CDN segments. Gcore has 550+ employees, raised a $70 million Series A in 2024, and says both the company as a whole and the CDN business are cash flow positive.

Gcore also said that, with several providers exiting the market, the redistribution of a portion of customers’ traffic to new CDNs contributed to meaningful growth. The company ended 2023 with just under $76 million in revenue, up nearly 60% from two years earlier. The company ended the year with 200 Tbps of network capacity across 210 CDN PoPs globally. Gcore says it has $12 million in customer commitments to expand its network next year and expects to add 65 Tbps in the first half of 2026.

The company also provided a detailed regional breakdown of Gcore’s global traffic, with the largest being North America at 29.4%, Europe at 27%.3%, Asia at 13.5% and South America at 13.3%. The company says its proprietary caching engine enables ~0.9 Gbps per server core, and Gcore supports HLS/DASH, LL-HLS/LL-DASH, WebRTC, QUIC/gQUIC transport and GPU-accelerated encoding. The company was founded in 2014 and has been offering CDN services and compute at the edge since then, with DAZN and Microsoft among its clients. If you are attending the NAB Show, you can see them at the NAB Show Streaming Summit.

In one of the most detailed blog posts yet [3,200 words], Netflix describes the custom Origin Server it built for live. The sentence I like most states that Netflix took a platform originally built for VOD and simply “extended nginx’s proxy-caching functionality to address live-specific needs.” This goes against those who claim that Netflix can’t deliver live streaming at scale because it “wasn’t built for live,” and of course, contradicts all the public viewership data, with Netflix having successfully streamed live events with an AMA number in the tens of millions. There is so much great info in the post, so here’s just a few things I wanted to highlight:

➡️ Leveraging Netflix’s microservice platform priority rate limiting feature, the origin prioritizes live edge traffic over DVR traffic during periods of high load on the storage platform. To mitigate traffic surges, TTL cache control is used alongside priority rate limiting. When low-priority traffic is impacted, the origin instructs Open Connect to slow down and cache identical requests for 5 seconds by setting max-age = 5s, and returns an HTTP 503 error code. This strategy effectively dampens traffic surges by preventing repeated requests to the origin within that 5-second window.

➡️ Netflix’s combination of cache and highly available storage has met the demanding needs of its Live Origin for over a year, and the solution they built was significantly more expensive, but minimizing cost was not a key objective, and low latency with high availability was.

➡️ Netflix uses failover orchestrated at the server-side to reduce client complexity, with resilience achieved through redundant regional live streaming pipelines and implements epoch locking at the cloud encoder, which enables the origin to select a segment from either encoding pipeline.

➡️ Netflix’s redundant cloud streaming pipelines operate independently, encompassing distinct cloud regions, contribution feeds, encoder, and packager deployments to substantially mitigate the probability of simultaneous defective segments across the dual pipelines.

➡️ Millisecond grain caching was added to nginx to enhance the standard HTTP Cache Control, which only works at second granularity, a long time when segments are generated every 2 seconds.

➡️ Netflix’s enhanced cache invalidation and origin masking enable live streaming operations to hide known problematic segments from streaming clients once the bad segments are detected, protecting millions of streaming clients during the DVR playback window.

You can read the entire Netflix blog post here.

Stats Perform acquired the assets of the ultra-low-latency tech company Phenix Real Time Solutions for approximately $7 million, including 21 patents. Stats Perform also rehired most of the former employees, with approximately nine coming over. In June of 2025, VC firm KB Partners put the assets of Phenix Real Time Solutions up for sale after the company continued to lose money, to the tune of almost $10 million last year, on sales of about $4 million.

No vendor can survive by selling a low/ultra-low latency solution as a stand-alone offering, as it must be sold as part of a larger video platform. This is exactly why the asset acquisiton makes sense for Stats Perform, which offers data collection and predictive analysis services tied to fantasy sports and sports betting. Ultra-low-latency tech can also help prevent piracy, a topic Stats Perform is discussing with leagues, OTT platforms and rights holders.

In the betting world, ultra-low-latency tech is needed to improve fan engagement, and Stats Perform has customers including the Premier League, WTA, FIBA, La Liga, and Serie A. Stats Perform is also FIFA’s first-ever official global distributor for betting data and live streaming rights, so it will be interesting to watch if FIFA wants to leverage any of the tech within their services. I can also think of how the ULL tech might be used to keep video in sync within a multiview feed.

Stats Perform tells me that while Phenix’s WebRTC-based tech works really well, Phenix never built the platform to scale or be cost-effective. Phenix never shared many details about its costs, but it once admitted that its platform was not designed to support more than 500,000 concurrent streams and that the overhead was expensive, even when it wasn’t being used.

Stats Perform has relaunched the Phenix tech within its platform, having already cut operating costs in half and continues to scale the tech, further reducing costs. This is exactly how ULL technology should be deployed, as a feature of a larger platform, not as a stand-alone service. Stats Perform will be well-positioned to monetize the tech across its entire platform for teams, leagues, broadcasters, betting companies, and social media. Stats Perform dominates its industry with an annual run rate of more than $550 million, nearly 2,800 employees and owns more than 560 patents.

I say this at the end of every year, but the last twelve months have seen an incredible amount of news and deals in the streaming industry, making it another busy year, with plenty to discuss. I want to thank all those who read my content across LinkedIn and my blog, contributed to the discussions and listened to my podcast. For me, 2025 marks 30 years since I worked on my first webcast, with the Macintosh New York Music Festival in NYC, and my role as an Apple Systems Engineer, which led to where I am today.

I will end 2025 with just over 10 million impressions on LinkedIn, becoming a Top Voice, reaching more than 1.7 million members, along with 2.8 million impressions on my blog, with the podcast nearing 100,000 downloads since launch – all while keeping my content free. While many have tried to convince me to monetize my content via paywalls, charging for newsletters or selling limited access, that’s not why I do this. Not everyone is driven by the need to monetize content, and the currency I focus on in the industry isn’t money, but something more valuable – trust. With readers, vendors, broadcasters, OTT platforms, sports leagues and many others, trust and relationships are my focus.

The industry has taken great care of me over the past three decades, for which I am grateful. I feel a sense of responsibility to help grow the industry by doing my best to inform, educate, and empower others, connecting them with those who are more intelligent than I am and separating facts from opinions. Good leaders invest in people, not ideas, and I am always trying to give back and invest in those in our industry.

Some think I am crazy to have published my cell phone number publicly for 25 years and, on average, reply to all calls and emails within 24 hours. But as a result, that’s where some of my best information comes from, the many people in the industry who are far smarter than I am, giving me the inside details on what’s really taking place. While some don’t like how direct I am in my speech and writing, that’s the number one request I hear from readers: to tell it like it is and provide the facts, without sugar-coating anything. You can be direct and also be professional at the same time.

For all those who have contributed to helping me tell stories, pointed out my spelling mistakes, sent me messages thanking me for my posts, and educated me on topics they know better than I do – I thank you. Next year is going to be a busy one. Get some rest, spend time with your family, catch up on some good video content and get ready for what looks to be a ridiculous amount of streaming news and deals in 2026. Happy Holidays! 🎄 📺

Since I write about vendors, I want to disclose that, effective December 2nd, I have become a minority shareholder in Hydrolix through a personal investment in the company. This is only the second time I have invested in a company in the streaming industry, the other being my seed investment in Datazoom, which I disclosed in a blog post in 2018.

Hydrolix really came onto my radar about 18 months ago when they started hiring a lot of smart people across the industry I respect, and I began to hear their name mentioned by many large OTT platforms and broadcasters, impressed with their platform. I’ve been saying for years that the ingestion, processing, and storage of user data tied to the streaming media workflow are the industry’s most significant problems. It’s not video compression, delivery or playback. Today, many large companies process over 1 billion transactions per day and ingesting and analyzing data at that scale has historically been impossible.

If you can’t manage it, you can’t measure it. And that’s the point of Hydrolix’s real-time data platform, which helps businesses manage and analyze massive volumes of data, enabling them to make informed decisions about their business. The challenges media and entertainment customers face with the volume of data they collect across siloed systems and multiple dashboards are real problems. Many store only 1% of the data they collect and discard the rest due to storage costs, or store it in cold storage, making it inaccessible in real time. These are all problems Hydrolix is working to solve for companies such as FOX, DAZN, and TF1. Further, through their OEM with Akamai, they’re delivering ingest and insights for over 600+ other major media, entertainment, and OTT leaders.

The company recently announced a new real-time CDN observability capability across companies’ distributed infrastructure, from edge to enterprise. This opens their solution for use across any of the major CDN providers. It also solves a critical need for anyone using a multi-CDN strategy, providing critical real-time correlation. While Hydrolix is known across the streaming market, video customers aren’t the only ones they support. The company also pulls in data tied to ad tech, cybersecurity, AIops and ITops. It is deeply integrated with AWS, offering a managed service for origin-to-edge observability for AWS CloudFront, AWS WAF, and AWS Elemental and with Akamai’s Connected Cloud, helping their customers detect and address performance and security issues proactively.

Hydrolix’s CEO Marty Kagan, co-founder of Cedexis in 2008, is a name many readers from the streaming industry will remember. Cedexis’s flagship product, Radar, monitored the quality of experience delivered by third-party CDNs to their customers, which was later acquired by Citrix in 2018. Before Cedexis, Marty spent over 8 years at Akamai. Across the company, there are some really smart people at Hydrolix working to solve big data problems for multiple industries and some of the largest Fortune 500 companies. I like what Marty and the Hydrolix team are building, the way they are going about it and the importance of their data platform that powers these critical data-intensive applications.

In Q1 of 2025, Hydrolix raised $80 million in a Series C round and has raised $140M to date. The company crossed $50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in April of 2025. If you want to learn more about Hydrolix, you can listen to my podcast with Marty, recorded earlier in the year, before I was a shareholder.

Disclaimer: I have never bought, sold, or traded any shares in any public CDNs, and even in my managed portfolios, CDNs are excluded. I was previously a shareholder in MediaPublisher and Encoding.com through share grants as an advisor, not via an investment. Aside from Datazoom and Hydrolix, I do not own any other shares of any other vendor in the streaming media industry.