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Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

Amazon had their fair share of livestream failures and for notably less viewers. I don't think they deserve a spot on that list. I briefly worked in streaming media for sports and while it's not a novel problem, there are so many moving parts and points of failure that it can easily all go badly.

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There is no one "Amazon" here, there are at least 3:

* Twitch: Essentially invented live streaming. Fantastic.

* Amazon Interactive Video Service [0]: Essentially "Twitch As A Service", built by Twitch engineers. Fantastic.

* Prime Video. Same exact situation as Netflix: original expertise is all in static content. Lots of growing pains with live video and poor reports. But they've figured it out: now there are regular live streams (NHL and NFL), and other channel providers do live streaming on Prime Video as a distribution platform.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/ivs/

Doesn't twitch almost fall over (other non-massive streams impacted) when anyone gets close to 4-5m concurrent viewers? I remember last time it happened everything started falling over, even for smaller streams. Even if Netflix struggled with the event, streaming other content worked just fine for me.

IVS does not scale past 1080p: https://ivs.rocks/

4K is overrated for streaming. Most people's connections can't handle it so it always ends up getting downscaled.

pisses me off.

physical media for the win, tho.

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