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Comment by vlan0 | Hacker News Reader

but having 20,000,000 TCP connections simultaneously streaming the Clemson vs Alabama title game vs 20,000,000 people tuning into a single broadcast is just a recipe for problems.

I'd beg to differ. The League of Legends eSports 2016 World Championship had 43 million unique viewers, 14.7 million concurrent. It is possible some viewers were from a cable TV in Korea, but it is unlikely to be a significant chunk of those figures.

The broadcast on Twitch.tv was also of much higher quality (1080p60) than what you receive from any cable company.

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If that broadcast was delayed to you by up to say, 10 minutes...would anyone have noticed or cared? Was there any other option to tune in? Would you have been getting scoring updates via push notifications on your phone? Would you have family and friends texting you with reactions during the game?

the delay is about 30 seconds. and yes. people text and talk about esports all the time. it's the fastest growing market of entertainment for men 18-35.

I remember watching the 2006 Super Bowl at a friend's apartment. One room had the SD broadcast going and the other had an HD brodcast. We'd be watching them line-up in HD and hear cheers from the other room because they already saw the play.

There are lots of delays today between different broadcasts. Just try to follow a sporting event on twitter or a forum and you will see.

Yes to all of those things. I used to work for Riot and the level of fandom is no less than any other sport I've ever seen. I'm not personally a fan, but people definitely watch together and chat/text/tweet each other with what is happening. The community in America is smaller than NFL fans.

>If that broadcast was delayed to you by up to say, 10 minutes...would anyone have noticed or cared?

Depending on the significance of the game in question, a delay of even a few seconds can be noticeable and annoying, because one of my friends on GroupMe is going to make a comment about an important goal the instant it happens.

I don't think I'd really care. There are often times where I'm forced to watch VODs of these matches due to the difference in time zones.

I don't converse with anyone about the games. It's just me and my cats. I also greatly despise push notifications to my phone, with the exception of email.

But, I have a feeling I'm an edge case scenario.

Though I agree a service could definitely come about to handle millions of concurrent viewers (I wouldn't be surprised if Youtube could/almost could handle it), I just want to point out those 14.7 million concurrent viewers were across all services. So not one service handling it all. Twitch, Youtube, Korea's Twitch (forget the name), and I believe China has a few major streaming companies.

You are correct. And that's the beauty of Riot's distribution. They do not lock you into a single platform. I'm not very familiar with traditional sports, but it seems most broadcasts have very limited viewing options.

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