Netflix first went live back in early 2023 when it streamed a Chris Rock gig. Since then, it’s continued to dip its toes into live content, from Beyonce’s halftime show during the Christmas Day 2024 NFL game, to the Screen Actors Guild Awards and last weekend’s Taylor-Serrano fight (which the streamer says had 6 million viewers).
In their latest blog post, Netflix’s technology team has revealed some of the work they have done to prepare the streamer for “going live”.
The team had nine months to prepare for that first live event, which led to the decision to “architect for future growth in both magnitude and multitude of events.”
To ensure secure and reliable live signal transport, Netflix leverages distributed and “highly connected” broadcast operations centres, with specialised equipment for signal ingest and inspection, closed-captioning, graphics and advertisement management.
These centres receive the event feed and then encode and package it for streaming by viewers. Netflix uses AWS MediaConnect and AWS MediaLive to acquire feeds in the cloud and transcode them into various video quality levels with bitrates tailored per show. “We built a custom packager to better integrate with our delivery and playback systems. We also built a custom Live Origin to ensure strict read and write SLAs for Live segments,” added the post.
To deliver the feeds to audiences, Netflix uses its own CDN, Open Connect, which has servers in over 6,000 locations around the world, and is connected to AWS locations via a dedicated Open Connect Backbone network.
In order to make its live content accessible to the majority its audience, Netflix employs HTTPS-based live streaming. “While UDP-based protocols can provide additional features like ultra-low latency, HTTPS has ubiquitous support among devices and compatibility with delivery and encoding systems,” said the post.
“Furthermore, we use AVC and HEVC video codecs, transcode with multiple quality levels up from SD to 4K, and use a 2-second segment duration to balance compression efficiency, infrastructure load, and latency. While prioritising streaming quality and playback stability, we have also achieved industry standard latency from camera to device, and continue to improve it.”
In order to meet demand, Netflix uses prediction-based techniques to pre-provision cloud and CDN capacity, and share forecasts with its ISP and cloud partners so they are prepared for the scale of viewers attempting to watch. “Then we complement them with reactive scaling of cloud systems powering sign-up, log-in, title discovery, and playback services to account for viewership exceeding our predictions. We have found success with forward-looking real-time viewership predictions during a live event, allowing us to take steps to mitigate risks earlier, before more members are impacted,” added the post.
According to the team, they are building on their learnings ahead of Netflix streaming the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2027.
The full blog post is available to read here.
