I’m pleased to announce an expanded program and launch of the call for speakers and sponsorships for the 2024 NAB Show Streaming Summit, taking place Monday and Tuesday, April 15-16 in Las Vegas. On day one, the show will expand with a NEW third track dedicated to AI topics and demos.

In an effort to help companies with their 2024 budgeting as early as possible, I’ve launched all sponsorships for the Summit which you can see here. I’ve revamped the call for speakers submission process to make it easier to submit and more informative so you can propose the best possible idea(s). I am always available to chat on the phone before you send in a submission to help you refine your proposal and give you real-time feedback.

For round-table sessions, I have already confirmed many new moderators and I will be adding some new content topics within the program, both technical and business related. If you are interested in being considered as a moderator, now is the time to reach out to me.

I’m excited to be expanding the show in 2024 with more topics, 100+ speakers and sessions rooms that will now be located on the first floor of the West Hall. Ideas? Questions? Please reach out to me at any time. Registration opens on November 14th, please reach out to me if you would like a discount code.

The hype around FAST, with almost no metrics tied to business is ridiculous. Every day there is a new report published that says FAST is “growing”, or that it is “taking share”. Growing how? Taking share from what? It’s nonsense. I see reports with the language of, “47% of US households use a FAST service each week,” but then it doesn’t define what “use” means. What’s not being shared are FAST ad CPMs, revenue, P&L, usage by viewing hours across channels, etc. In other words, actual business metrics outside of limited info from some of the TV manufacturers who have FAST offerings.

FAST services are NOT taking away any share, defined as subscriber dollars, from SVOD services and not a single SVOD service has ever disclosed during an earnings call that time spent on FAST services is impacting their churn. Media pointing to data from Tubi and others showing “growth” in FAST MAUs is garbage when for some of these FAST services you only have to open up the app and not watch anything to still be counted as a MAU.

We also don’t see any FAST service breaking down what percentage of total viewing comes from their channel list. Some FAST services tell me that 90% of their viewership comes from 10% or less of their channels. A report by Kantar says that in Q3, “FAST services outpaced VoD streaming,” but doesn’t define what “outpaced” means. Later in the report, it says that “Netflix remains the #1 VoD destination when streamers want to find new content.” Almost all FAST channels are VOD, not live.

I wish those in the streaming industry and the media would stop using the word “growth” to describe FAST. The word is overhyped, unqualified, and has no real business metrics behind it. Almost everything I read about FAST is marketing fluff with tons of charts and graphs, none of which speak to any actual business metrics.

As an example, this eMarketer chart on FAST is useless with such high-level generic words with no definitions saying, “FAST viewers will reach 100.6 billion in the US.” What is defined as a “viewer”? They also say, “the Roku Channel claims the largest share of FAST viewers, at 67.4%, followed by Tubi (64.4%) and Pluto TV (57.1%),” defined how? Share of what? None of those companies mentioned disclose or break out any usage of their FAST service. For any third party to suggest they can narrow down “share”, based on any metric they want to pick, down to a 3% difference between services is ridiculous.

While a private company, CDN77 is allowing me to disclose its revenue and growth numbers, which comes at a great time with some of the vendor changes in the market. Revenue for 2023 will be in the $140M-$150M range, with two-thirds of revenue coming from content delivery and the other portion from infrastructure services.

The company says total 2023 revenue is up 30% year-over-year and should get closer to 40% year-over-year growth in 2024. Growth has accelerated in the second half of 2023 and the company expects it to further accelerate in Q1 of 2024. The company is currently cash flow positive and gets the majority of its delivery revenue from video content outside the US. Since the start of the year, they have upgraded their network from 105 Tbps to 150 Tbps of egress capacity.

I’ve been impressed with how focused and nimble the company operates. When Lumen announced they were exiting the CDN market, CDN77 quickly set up a dedicated transition team for Lumen customers. A week ago, the company announced they had already on-boarded 20 ex-Lumen customers onto their network in the past month.

While it’s hard to run a profitable content delivery business, CDN77 has the benefit of having the majority of its revenue coming from outside the US and having customers in the high tens / low hundreds size. Margins on those contracts are much better and not as price sensitive to US-based delivery pricing and super large customers spending tens of millions of dollars a year who always want the lowest price. There is a profitable business to be made in the mid-tier market for vendors that specialize, which is exactly what CDN77 is doing.

If you strip out the largest CDN vendors by revenue, Akamai, Amazon, Fastly, Edgio, and Google, and exclude CDNs in China, CDN77 would be the next largest CDN services vendor in the market, based on revenue. It’s great to see a vendor have a profitable business in the CDN industry while staying focused on a specific segment of the market and being strategic on how they grow their business. Thanks to CDN77 for allowing me to release their revenue numbers which helps everyone in the industry evaluate overall growth in the market.

In a recent discussion with CEO Stefan Lederer at Bitmovin, the company is seeing some accelerating growth in the market this year with 2022 revenue in the “twenties million” range and growing to the 30s next year. The company will be cash flow positive in early 2024 and is increasing its margins, especially with software-only/licensing deals.

Bitmovin is seeing quite a growth in new logos again, driven by media companies needing to become more efficient, encoding costs that don’t factor in CDN and egress costs, and some companies moving away from their in-house players which can be inefficient and expensive to maintain.

Bitmovin is also seeing good sales growth from the channel being deployed across the AWS Marketplace, Google Cloud Marketplace, and Microsoft Azure Marketplace, further expanding its TAM. Bitmovin was also named as a recommended replacement for Microsoft’s Azure Media Services, which will be retired in June 2024, a deal that is expected to help the company expand in the market. On the self-service side, Stefan said they have signed up over 200 new paying customers so far this year.

While many think of transcoding and video players as a commodity, defined as being interchangeable with other services of the same type, it’s not that simple. Encoding/transcoding services in particular are one of the basic building blocks of the industry but there are many, many differences between solutions in the market. The vendors that will succeed in the market and continue to grow revenue, while also reaching profitability, will need to be laser-focused on their product feature set. That’s a strength Bitmovin has in the market with its products and vertical industry focus.

Bitmovin’s last round of funding was $25 million in 2021 and they have raised $68 million to date. It should be noted that many websites that claim to list accurate revenue numbers for vendors are flat-out wrong. If you look online at Bitmovin, third-party databases and some industry analysts list their revenue as $11 million or $100 million. Do not trust any of these individuals as their numbers for vendors are always off by a large multiple.

During Harmonic’s Q3 earnings call the company announced they will undergo a strategic review of their video business. While some are suggesting this means their product line is having problems, is not a sign of weakness with the video business or with the company. The company has a responsibility to shareholders to conduct a review when other companies have shown interest in potentially acquiring part of their business and Harmonic commented that they are looking at their “capital allocation priorities over the next several years.” These are steps good companies take to evaluate their business in the mid to long term.

As of the closing price of their stock on October 31, in the last 5 years, Harmonic’s stock has given investors a 75.16% return (Earlier in the year the return was 337.81%). They generated free cash flow of $9.1M in Q3 and have $75.6M in cash plus another $6.3 million in short-term investments. They guided to a range of $80-$95M in cash for the end of Q4. Their gross margins for all their business lines have been consistent with very little decline.

Revenue growth for the video business was down year-over-year, but that’s not surprising considering how long sales cycles are taking. Half of their new SaaS wins in the quarter were with historic appliance customers so there will be some time needed to transition from on-prem to cloud. Their video SaaS revenue made up 24% of all video revenue in the quarter and is growing. For Broadband they said they still expect to see a rebound in Q4 and the potential to hit record revenue in the quarter.

Harmonic has a healthy balance sheet and are in the driver’s seat of what they do with any of their business lines IF they were to choose to sell something off. The one big risk to the business is that Comcast represents 41% of total revenue, so a high concentration like that is always a risk but is something that is well known.

Don’t let people distract you from the actual numbers especially when they are comparing Harmonic to private companies and making references to other companies “growing faster” or having “great results” when they don’t know their numbers or break any of them out. Even some of the companies who are public that they are comparing them to haven’t even put out Q3 numbers yet.

Podcast episode 73 is live. This week we break down the numbers from Netflix’s Q3 earnings, their content spend for 2024, what their ad business looks like today and the reasons why many are undervaluing Netflix’s prospects for AVOD in the coming years. We also talk about YouTube’s statement indicating that they most likely won’t participate in the upcoming round of bidding for NBA broadcast rights and we highlight ESPN’s newly released revenue figures. In conclusion, we discuss Lumen’s departure from the CDN sector and the recent patent litigation filed by Sling TV and Dish Network against BritBox.

[Updated Jan 15, 2024] It has been three decades since some of the first live events were streamed online in 1993, starting with audio-only events suited for dial-up users. Since the streaming media industry started, many have continued to debate which online event has had the largest total viewership. In all honesty, no one truly knows what the largest event is since it’s impossible to fairly compare one event to another using the same methodology. No standards for reporting viewership exist, and almost no live-streaming events are validated by a third party. Details around unique viewers, average bitrate, and device usage are never released.

The title of the largest live streaming event on the Internet changes depending on the methodology used by the individual. To date, Disney’s stream of the India-Pakistan ICC Cricket World Cup match on October 14, 2023, on their Disney + Hotstar platform had the largest number of “concurrent viewers” at 35 million. However, no average bitrate number was released by Disney nor was any data about the average viewing time. The previous record of 32 million “concurrent peak viewers” in 2023 by JioCinema of the IPL finals match had an average bitrate of around 1Mbps. I would expect Disney’s stream for the ICC to be similar in size. Live streaming events by Amazon and others have done almost half as many peak viewers, but the average bitrate was much higher than Disney or IPL’s at around 7Mbps. So, while one event had a larger audience, the other had a larger number of Tbps sustained and was delivered at a much higher quality.

Another problem in comparing streaming events is that none of the companies involved will discuss their definition of a “viewer.” For instance, with Amazon’s Thursday Night Football games, the video auto-plays in the background on the home screen of Fire TV devices and their website. If users don’t click on the video and engage with it at all, are they still considered viewers? Does a viewer have to watch the video for a certain length before being counted? We don’t know since none of the companies that stream live events will answer these questions, and their metrics could all be different. For example, in 2020, Netflix changed the metric they used to classify a VOD viewer from anyone who watched 70% of a title down to anyone who watched at least 2 minutes of a video, long or short form. That’s a big difference and a significant change. On TV, we have agreed upon viewer metrics and standards, but with streaming, neither exists. We also have different third-party companies releasing data, for instance, Nielsen and Adobe, with different methodologies.

It also doesn’t help that many in the industry and the media incorrectly report numbers and don’t take the time to read the numbers given out properly. For example, in 2022, NBC Sports said the 11.2 million AMA number reported for the 2022 Super Bowl was not comparable to the 2021 Super Bowl or Amazon’s numbers from the 2022 TNF games. The 11.2 million was a viewers-per-stream figure and is not directly comparable to past years when co-viewing was not as prevalent. NBC Sports said the figure comparable to past years was the 6 million number released, which marked a 5% increase over the 2021 Super Bowl of 5.7 million. Out-of-home viewing and streaming did not factor into the household rating. And yet almost no one in the media picked up on that and reported it accurately, giving out wrong year-over-year growth numbers.

Many want to compare the popularity of live streaming events on the internet to viewership numbers of events on cable TV but are missing the point that you can’t compare the two from a quality of experience (QoE) standpoint. No matter where a viewer is in the country when watching an NFL game on pay TV or which pay TV provider they use, everyone gets the same video quality and experience. Broadcast TV has standards for video delivery, and the pay TV provider owns the hardware in the home. With pay TV, we all know what 720p or 1080p means and looks like. With streaming, no standards exist for video quality or type of streaming device, and users around the country all get a different level of video experience. One viewer on pay TV does not always have the same level of video experience as one viewer via a streaming service.

Based on the numbers I have seen released, below is my list of the top ten largest live streaming events in the industry to date. Nearly all of them are tied to cricket matches, NFL Football, and League Of Legends gaming. Many gaming events are broadcast in over a dozen languages by multiple broadcasters across dozens of platforms. It’s not the same distribution as Amazon’s Thursday Night Football games, which are only available in US territories, or cricket matches that are only available on a single streaming platform, so that’s another variable to point out. I may have missed some numbers released so please leave a comment on this LinkedIn post if you think another event should be added. The comment must include a link to a release, blog post, or article with numbers to be considered. I will update this list as more events take place and more numbers are announced.

1. 59 Million: The cricket World Cup 2023 final match on November 19, 2023, hit a “concurrent viewers” peak of 59 million on the Disney+ Hotstar platform, according to Disney. (source)
2. 53 Million: The CC ODI World Cup 2023 semi-final match between India and New Zealand on November 15, 2023, hit a “concurrent viewers” peak of 53 million on the Disney+ Hotstar platform, according to Disney. (source)
3. 43 Million: The ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 match between India and New Zealand on Oct 22, 2023, hit a “concurrent viewers” peak of 43 million on the Disney+ Hotstar platform, according to Disney. (source)
4. 35 Million: The India-Pakistan match of the ICC Cricket World Cup played on October 14, 2023, hit a peak of 35 million “concurrent” viewers on the Disney+ Hotstar platform, according to Disney. (source)
5. 32 Million: The May 2023 JioCinema stream of the IPL finals match had 32 million “concurrent peak viewers” as reported by the rights holder Viacom18. (source)
6. 30.6 Million: Riot Games announced that the 2021 finals between DWG Kia from South Korea and Edward Game from China drew an average minute audience of 30.6 million viewers. (source)
7. 25.3 Million: The semi-final match between India and New Zealand during the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup had a peak concurrency of 25.3 million viewers on Disney+ Hotstar as reported by the ICC. (source)
8. 24.5 Million: The May 2018 League Of Legends final peaked at just over 24.5 million simultaneous streams which was reported by ESC. (source)
9. 24 Million: Chennai Super Kings’ victory over Royal Challengers Bangalore in April 2023 was watched by a peak concurrent audience of 24 million users as reported by the rights holder Viacom18. (source)
10. 18.6 Million: In 2019 Akamai reported that the twelfth edition of the VIVO IPL cricket tournament peaked at 18.6 million concurrent viewers. (source)
11. 16.3 Million: (***with a BIG caveat and maybe should not be on the list): Nielsen says the NFL Wild Card game of the Chiefs and Dolphins on January13th, 2024, had an AMA of approximately 23 million viewers across Peacock, NBC stations in Miami and Kansas City, and on mobile with NFL+. But that number includes TV in two local markets. So the number I am using for this list is the 16.3 million concurrent devices for Peacock. However, the 16.3 million number does not include viewers who streamed the game via NFL+ and vMVPDs like YouTube TV. So the total number would be a little higher, and NBC Sports used the term concurrent devices, not AMA for Peacock, so it’s not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison to data from other events. (source)
12. 16 Million: Viacom18 reported that the April 2023 opening weekend of the Indian Premier League (IPL) on Jio Cinema had a simultaneous stream count of 16 million viewers. (source)
13. 15 Million (***with a BIG caveat and maybe should not be on the list): Amazon reported that the NFL Thursday Night Football game between the Vikings and Eagles on September 14, 2023, had 15.1 million “viewers on Prime Video”. Amazon also reported that the NFL Thursday Night Football game between the Giants and the 49ers on September 21st, 2023, had 12.48 million streaming “viewers”. But note they did NOT say simultaneous users or average minute audience, just viewers, with no definition of how a viewer is defined. Also, they said that number was across “Prime Video, Twitch, and NFL+,” so that’s not concurrent streams on one platform. Due to this reason, I am not including any other Amazon TNF games on the list. (source)
14. 11 Million: JioCinema says the World Cup final between Argentina and France in December 2022, attracted 11 million concurrent users on JioCinema with an average viewing time of 30 minutes per match. (source)
15. 10.3 Million: On May 27th, 2018, Hotstar’s live stream of the 11th edition of the Indian Premier League cricket tournament had its stream peak at 10.3M simultaneous viewers. (source)

Other notable mentions include the ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization, live streaming the soft landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the South Polar lunar surface in August 2023 which peaked at 8 million concurrent viewers. Some might wonder why events like the World Cup and Super Bowl don’t dominate the list because most viewers watch those events on pay TV. Fox said the 2023 Super Bowl was the most-streamed Super Bowl event ever, with an average of 7 million streams. For FOX’s streaming of the 2022 World Cup, the most-streamed contest was the World Cup Final between France and Argentina with an average minute audience of 1.3 million viewers. Outside the US the numbers are larger, but the majority of the World Cup is viewed on TV, which you can see a breakdown of here for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.