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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

I watched the most recent Superbowl via streaming. Technically, streaming sports is about as easy as streaming any other video. One big hurdle is all the licensing because there is a lot of money involved. Edit: The other hurdle is horizontally scaling live streaming video to over 100 million devices.

Networks like the NFL Network are doomed as soon as most NFL fans realize they could be streaming literally any game they want to watch from a Netflix-style service, or watch any number of games in a community from a curated Cytube-style list, instead of having just the 1 game at a time.

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Not completely true. Everyone wanting to want to watch it at the same time causes issues. Other videos you can distribute the video to caches ahead of time, so the burden on the outgoing connection is less.

Are you describing a problem between live streaming and pre-recorded video? How does Twitch handle their load? How many more people are watching the average football game vs watched "Twitch Plays Pokemon" at its peak?

Edit: TPP had 60,000-70,000 simultaneous viewers on average, with a peak of 120,000.[1] In 2014, each NFL game had about 17.6 million viewers.[2] So an order of magnitude increase. How well does live streaming video scale horizontally?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pok%C3%A9mon#View...

[2]http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2015/01/09/nfl-2014-tv-reca...

MLB streamed to 60 million viewers on opening day this year. [1]

Granted that is 14 different events being streamed, but they eclipse Twitch in terms of live streaming by a huge amount.

[1] - http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/07/mlb-com-hits-home-run-with-...

You can take the Eurovision Song Contest as example.

Millions of people watching via livestream, overall (including TV), the largest annual TV event (197 million overall)

Livestreaming scales very nicely horizontally, if done properly.

And this is an event that is completely done without any ads or commercial investor backing it.

stephengillie, "twitch plays pokemon" maxed out at 121,000 concurrent (according to Twitch) viewers, last years Super Bowl maxed out at 120,800,000 viewers. So yes, I would say it is a considerably different scale.

Once the NFL put together the NFL Network it quickly started using it to broadcast games. It isn't doomed by streaming, it provides some (much?) of the stadium side infrastructure that is still necessary for streaming.

Is there a way to legally stream sports like the big football game in february, without already having a cable subscription? That's the one thing (well, aside from big bang theory) my family and I miss from cable.

I was surprised to find it so easy to stream from NFL.com last winter. Maybe adblock software helped. And the television ads were included in the stream and so were basically unavoidable. I used the old-fashioned adblock of muting the stream during the television commercials.

If you are close enough to a big city, you should be able to use free-to-air TV broadcasts. You can get an ATSC receiver for your PC if you don't have a TV, and DVR software that lets you skip commercials and run your own replays as you like.

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