How WWE Made WrestleMania XXX its Biggest Live Streamed Event
Large-scale live streamed events are only getting bigger, and at the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City, experts from the WWE, Major League Baseball, and NewTek explained how to pull them off. As Joe Lalley, vice president of product strategy and operations for World Wrestling Entertainment explained, WrestleMania XXX was his company's biggest live event ever.
"Our largest event since we launched the network has been WrestleMania XXX," Lalley said. "If you're not familiar, WrestleMania is the Super Bowl for the WWE. It's a huge, huge event. It took place at the beginning of April and that's been our largest event. We were hitting a half-million to three-quarters of a million concurrents during that event. It was pretty huge, and on the same night that 'Game of Thrones' was premiering, so there's a lot of internet traffic going on at the same time."
Putting on a large-scale live event involves a lot of planning, especially when the audience is paying for quality.
"You have to take into account that our service is a premium service. People are paying for this, so it may be one thing to do a really large-scale event that's free, but it's entirely another thing to do a paid large-scale event, so quality really, really matters," Lalley continued. "We did an enormous amount of preparation, making sure that we had adequate capacity on the CDN-side, making sure that we had customer service ready to deal with any issues that may come up. We made sure that we were paying attention to social, making sure we were monitoring everything and addressing issues before they came up."
For the full discussion, watch the video below.
Big Streaming: Technical Challenges of Large-Scale Live Events
There are a host of live streaming options available today, but most break down when the crowd gets too large. In this session we will explore techniques successfully used to provide a satisfying live viewing experience at very large scale. Learn from experts who have conquered the myriad technical challenges—how to present live video to many people, in many formats, on many devices, over many networks—all at the same time. Specifics such as encoding, transcoding, bitrate variation, distribution, mass authorization, and more will be discussed.
Moderator: Jeff Gilbert, Director, Business Development, Exceda US
Speaker: Will Waters, Senior Video Specialist, NewTek
Speaker: Joe Inzerillo, CTO, SVP Content Technology, Major League Baseball Advanced Media
Speaker: Joe Lalley, VP, Product Strategy & Operations, World Wrestling Entertainment
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