If you watched the Super Bowl this past weekend and you viewed the live-stream on the web, Microsoft"s Azure platform was the technology powering the stream. For "Super Stream Sunday", as the company calls it because using Super Bowl would get them sued, a new record was set that broke the previous record-setting live stream, the 2014 Super Bowl.
During the Super Bowl, 2.5 million unique users viewed the event with peak of 1.3 million viewers. With 800,000 average viewers per minute, this surpassed the 2014 Super Bowl that had an average viewing of 528,000.
Azure"s Media Services, the component of Azure that provided the services for the live stream, used less than 10% of the provisioned capacity which means that the service was not even close to hitting its peak which attributed to the 100% uptime during the game.
As live streaming becomes more and more popular, Microsoft is positioning itself to be able to support these activities and they have now proven twice, that they can handle the largest events without any issue. While not everyone is ready to dump their cable subscription and view all of the content on the web, there is a strong movement in this direction which means that these streaming capabilities will be a strategic asset for Microsoft going forward.
Source: Microsoft | Thanks for the tip Mike!