We livecast SAIC’s biggest-ever commencement ceremony, in which Kanye West received an honorary degree. We designed a webcasting solution that was flexible and scalable enough to withstand over 20x the online viewing audience vs. past SAIC commencements. The webcast was uneventful – which is our definition of success. Not a single issue or complaint. In a manner of speaking, we let Kanye finish.
The technology:
We selected Akamai – unequivocally the largest and most reliable content delivery network on the planet, as the backbone to support this mission-critical event.
We served up nearly 20K concurrent connections to the live stream over the course of 2.5 hours. Nearly 19% of all traffic originated from >5,000 miles from Chicago.
We spent several weeks modeling edge server scale and performance results leading to a carefully planned and calculated server strategy.
Several news outlets, including CNN, NBC and France24 picked up and transmitted the live webcast.
The event:
https://vimeo.com/129812494