It’s that time of year when 61,000 leaders in the broadcast, media and entertainment industries come together for the NAB Conference. This year’s conference will take place in Las Vegas, and will feature presentations, booths, and networking opportunities related to emerging trends across AI, the creator economy, sports, streaming/OTT, and cloud virtualization.
Hydrolix will be there in full force. We have a booth (#W4000) that will showcase our streaming data lake for managed observability and plenty of swag. We are also co-sponsoring several networking events. A comprehensive list is below.
One of our main highlights is speaking in the AWS Theater (#W1343 at 2:00pm) with Fox Corporation. The focus is a Q&A fireside chat featuring Fox Corporation’s Senior Director of Video Engineering, Dilip Singh, Hydrolix Field CTO Catherine Johnson, and CTO Todd Persen, with me as the moderator. The chat, titled Q&A: Behind the Scenes of Running Major Live Streaming Events, will include Dilip, Catherine and Todd discussing the inner workings of running live streaming events. The topic is timely because Hydrolix was Fox’s sole multi-CDN observability provider for this year’s Super Bowl.
Hydrolix runs on any cloud platform. For the Super Bowl, it ran on AWS. Hydrolix launched on the AWS Marketplace in 2024, and we are now an ISV Accelerate and CloudFront Service Ready partner. Hydrolix for AWS is a managed observability service that ingests AWS origin and edge data from Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, and Elemental (with more integrations coming soon). Hydrolix retains the data for 15+ months and presents the top performance and security insights in one consolidated dashboard. The service ingests massive amounts of data and alerts on incidents in real time so that companies can fix issues instantly, before users notice. During the Super Bowl, Hydrolix hit a peak of 17.4 GB/second, the equivalent of 1.4 petabytes a day. Companies can also query data in seconds because Hydrolix keeps all data hot, no matter its age or amount.
Catherine and Todd were at the helm of managing Hydrolix during the Super Bowl. With years of experience under their belts, they know firsthand the challenges that go into these kinds of events. The challenges include:
- Unpredictable loads: With large events, there can be major spikes in traffic. Many platforms have challenges at hyperscale, potentially resulting in gaps when you most need data.
- Large data volumes: Streaming events create massive amounts of data. As an example, a recent global cricket match that Hydrolix monitored brought in 60 million viewers. More viewers means more devices which means more data.
- Responding quickly to issues: Because it’s a live event, you have to react quickly if something goes wrong. Many observability platforms can have significant delays with time to glass—the amount of time it takes for operations teams to visualize and query incoming data. At hyperscale, the issue of latency can be much worse, with the potential for platforms to fall over or have outages. Ingest latency and query response times must be minimal, so that IT operations and engineering teams can fix issues before they impact users and revenue. Media companies measure performance during an event in terms of dollars per revenue per minute, specifically when it comes to advertisements. Every minute down means potentially losing money from advertisers and partners. That’s why ensuring you can detect incidents and recover quickly is critical.
The Recipe for Running a Successful Live Event
Considering those challenges, using an observability service that autoscales for peak traffic without outages or high latency is critical. If you need to ingest and query more data, and decide if changes need to be made, the service should easily increase the load intake so you can see where to implement changes. The key to achieving that goal is seeing data in real-time and in one consolidated dashboard, coupled with dedicating a well-trained group of operators who can take the data and act on it.
For the Super Bowl, Catherine and Todd joined a team of more than a dozen people dedicated to analyzing incoming data and making changes when needed. Preparations entailed a mix of load testing, reviewing learning from similar events they had run in the past, and dry runs. They discussed ways to improve query efficiency, questions the customer might ask during the game, and how to summarize data for better dashboard performance. They also made sure everyone knew their responsibility and how to effectively escalate incidents for fast resolution.
If you want to hear more details about how to run live events and are attending NAB, join our theater presentation and meet our Hydrolix team.
Schedule of Hydrolix Events at NAB
Here is a list of all of our activities and how you can participate:
- Any time: Stop by Hydrolix booth #W4000 in West Hall.
- Reserve a meeting: Are you interested in booking a meeting with our experts? We have a meeting room reserved #W2577 in West Hall. Book a time here.
- Saturday, April 5, 3:30 PM: Bitmovin is one of our key partners. Together, we help media companies gain end-to-end visibility into their digital content journey, spotting performance blockages instantly so that changes can be made before end users are impacted. Meet our teams at the Fontainebleu Las Vegas on Saturday, April 5th at 3:30 PM.
- Monday, April 7, 5:00 PM: Join us on the third floor terrace of West Hall for a drink and discussion about the latest OTT trends and technologies delivering the greatest user experiences! Hydrolix is co-sponsoring the summit mixer at 5PM on April 7th at the NAB Streaming Summit.
- Monday, April 7, 5:30 PM: Join Akamai and Hydrolix at an invitation-only watch party for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game at one of the best sports bar venues in Las Vegas. Reserve your seat here.
- Tuesday, April 8, 2:00 PM: The theater Q&A panel Behind the Scenes of Running Major Live Streaming Events is April 8th at 2:00 PM. Read the details here and join us.
- Tuesday, April 8, 3:00 PM: Practice your golf swing and network while enjoying food and drinks with Akamai and Hydrolix at Topgolf Las Vegas. Register here.
- Tuesday, April 8, 8:00 PM: Watch our Hydrolix leaders rock and roll at AWS Band Night at 8:00 PM on April 8th at the Brooklyn Bowl, AWS’s biggest NAB event for the media and entertainment community! Register here.
Next Steps
If you’re not using Hydrolix yet and would like to learn more, contact Hydrolix about a managed trial or demo.
