Hotstar Live Streaming – Note: We’ll cover some basic concepts and then dive into designing a live streaming service
As a die-hard cricket fan and Disney+ Hotstar subscriber, there isn’t a single live cricket match where my eyes don’t measure the live audience and my eyes are almost glued to the counter during the tense moments of the match.
Hotstar Live Streaming

Even in those stressful times, as an engineer, I couldn’t stop admiring the scale of Hotstar+AWS+Akamai’s work.
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The engineers who worked on this solution would have been very proud to see the world enjoying the fruits of their labor.
For readers wondering about the significance of this. Hotstar consistently serves more than 10 million concurrent users without any issues. In fact, in 2019, the Hotstar system (AWS + Akamai) served 2.53 million concurrent users.
And this record will soon be broken by another live cricket event on the same platform.
The first step in the publishing process is getting a camera feed. In the case of sporting events, camera feeds are usually sent back to a central production facility via a satellite link or dedicated high-speed internet line.
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Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is a TCP-based protocol designed to maintain a persistent low-latency connection when transferring content from the source (encoder) to the hosting server.
The camera is transmitted to the RTMP Encoder Server via HDMI. The encoding server converts incoming video to the desired bitrate and codec – usually H.264 for AAC video and audio.
One of the challenges in live streaming is streaming to various types of devices such as mobile phones, desktops, smart TVs, etc. For this, the input video, which is usually 8K/4K, is converted into a different format. This video conversion process is called transcoding.
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It takes an 8K/4K video input stream and converts it to a lower bitrate stream such as HD at 6Mbps, 3Mbps, 1Mbps, 600kbps, etc.
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The streaming server also pushes all versions of the video to storage such as Amazon S3 for later checkout.
The web player on the client makes a connection to the media server and requests live video. The media server, which in this case is more like an edge server, responds with a stream of the relevant video format that the player requests.
If you like what you read, subscribe for interesting articles about Blazor, web performance, usability, and frontend design. Hotstar serves 25 million concurrent users with live streaming of India – Pakistan – Asia Cup matches. As an illustration, before Hotstar, the record was held by YouTube with 8 million concurrent users. It happened in 2015 when in an IPL match, Hotstar broadcast live streaming of the match to 15 million users simultaneously.
But, before Hotstar, we used to watch matches on television. What changed? How is it different from Hotstar stream?
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1. First of all, live broadcast does not mean a millisecond difference. Before there were live streaming applications, there was already live TV which was used to stream news and cricket/football matches. The delay in this performance can be between 5 and 20 seconds. This difference is widely exploited by cricket match bookies to make money.
2. Now, let’s understand why there is a delay in live TV. Television signals can be broadcast via transmitters that send audio and video signals to people’s homes via cable/satellite (with antenna).
3. Video is a collection of images that change speed and appear to create a movement effect. This is a raw video. The raw video is large and must be compressed to be broadcast. During a live broadcast, the video from the camera is encoded first. This is a way to compress videos into meaningful chunks without reducing quality.

4. Once the video is encoded, it is sent via transmitter via satellite or TV tower to your home.
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5. Then comes the live broadcast. This is done by Hotstar. The coding process remains the same. But now, the video has to go through a streaming site and reach you via the internet (fiber optic cables laid under the sea).
6. In live streaming, the server receives the encoded video, but then has to send it to the viewer. For this to happen, there needs to be an open connection between the user and the server. These connections generally rely on a managed persistent TCP connection between the client and server. This can be done with the help of Websocket. The protocols used are mostly HLS or MPEG-DASH.
7. However these servers can be anywhere in the world, the connection establishment time and data transfer time can be very long and cause huge delays.
8. This is where CDN comes into play, live videos (chunks) are cached in CDN and content is served to users through this CDN. Hotstar uses Akamai as its CDN. The stream flows from the server to the CDN where it is cached and then reaches you through the CDN.
K Live Cricket Streaming On Hotstar
6. So all this is happening, there must be a lag in this. Before HLS and MPEG DASH, this delay was up to one minute. However, with this protocol, the delay is reduced to 3-10 seconds. But, sometimes TV broadcasts are still faster than live broadcasts.
007 movie and music addict of all genres and all generations. A little philosophy with a little music and a little coding. Over the past year, Disney+ Hotstar has continued to make bad headlines for Disney, after it lost the rights to the popular Indian Premiere Cricket League, resulting in the streaming service losing over 20 million subscribers. These losses have pushed the streaming service back towards its target for total global subscribers and even led Disney to explore the potential sale of some of its operations in India.
While the loss of IPL cricket rights has saved Disney billions of dollars, this Saturday Disney+ Hotstar managed to score a much-needed win, as the streaming service reclaimed the global video-on-demand streaming record with 35 million concurrent viewers tuning in. live Cricket World Cup match between India and Pakistan.

The previous record was held by another cricket match on Viacom18’s JioCinema, with 32 million viewers. However, the game’s viewership fell short of Disney’s expectations, which estimated that the game could reach more than 50 million concurrent viewers during the tournament and reach 82% of India’s total annual video users over its nearly 50-day run.
Live Stream 25 Million Concurrent Users
One of the main reasons why Disney+ Hotstar is attracting a large number of viewers is its change of strategy by offering free live streaming of the games.
According to Techcrunch, after the Cricket World Cup ends next month, several top Indian executives will fly to Disney’s US headquarters to finalize the future of Disney’s operations in India. It is unknown what Disney’s decision will be regarding the future of Disney Star, such as selling its linear business, its film studio, or even Disney+ Hotstar.
Roger has been a Disney fan since he was a child and this interest has continued to grow over the years. He has visited Disney parks all over the world and has a large collection of Disney films and collectibles. He owns What’s On Disney Plus & DiskKingdom. Email: Roger@ Twitter: Twitter.com/RogPalmerUK Facebook: Facebook.com/rogpalmeruk
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