Who Broke Today’s Live Streaming Record, YouTube or Akamai?

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Today was the day that Felix Baumgartner set several records for ascending to 128,000 feet in a balloon capsule and jumping to earth 4 minutes and 20 seconds later. An epic day of achievements for Red Bull Stratos for sure.

YouTube is also claiming a new record of serving up more than 8 million concurrent live streams for the “most concurrent views ever on YouTube.” Also amazing to be sure. The previous record for this achievement goes to Akamai for serving up close to 7 million concurrents during Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration in 2009.

What’s interesting about this is that Akamai also served up a good chunk, if not all, of the live streams for today’s event. What a lot of people don’t know is that YouTube often relies on Akamai’s large footprint live CDN to handle big events. It’s not uncommon for live stream services to off-load capacity to third-party networks if an event is bigger than their own network can handle. YouTube has stellar capacity for the on-demand videos we all love, but when it comes to live events, they often extend their reach by using Akamai’s live streaming network services.

This begs the question, if Akamai served up all of YouTube’s live requests for today’s record breaking event, did Akamai just break their own record from 2009?

YouTube Live threshold lowered to 100 subscribers

It's a bit of good news for those looking to live stream economically advertising (free) an event without annoying pre-roll or overlay. YouTube, which has experimented with live in different stages since 2008, has lowered the threshold to use their YouTube Live streaming service. From Friday, holders of an account YouTube needs only to have 100 subscribers to their channel and be in good and due form to use the new features live streaming. If you can not get 100 subscribers, then you should be probably just let Internet.

A quick overview of the features that make YouTube so compelling live:

Completely free live and commercial-free (unless you want to, then you can participate in the revenue sharing) supports up to stream 1080 p to 6 MB/PSUs-bitrate transcoding HD - encode an HD stream and other charges are automatically generated and offered to the player (1080, 720, 480, 240, 360) Mobile/tablet support (Android & iOS) DVR functionality - rewind automatically at an earlier part of a direct broadcastAutomatic recording of the event live (duration 4 hours) analyticsFree in real time detailed Office encoder software – Wirecast for YouTube

To start, log in to your YouTube account. Go to settings-> the channel characteristics. Scroll down and you'll see a line that says live events.  Click on the button that says Enable next to him. If you do not activate, keep checking back as YouTube launches Live gradually to handle the expected load.  See the YouTube Live Streaming Guide for more information.  Happy streaming!