Eric Elbaz is Principal Strategic Engagements Manager at Akamai—here to share his thoughts on something to be thankful for as you and your family gather to watch the Thanksgiving Parade.
As you settle in with loved ones to watch the Thanksgiving parade, take a moment to appreciate what it takes to make this beloved tradition available to millions—and flawlessly stream the event across countless devices. Live streaming has become a core part of how we share and celebrate big moments. The technology powering such live events is nothing short of extraordinary, ensuring a smooth viewing experience, no matter where you are or what you’re watching on. It is truly something to be thankful for.
Consider for a moment that a single-day event like the US national football championship could potentially see tens of millions of viewers across all streaming platforms, creating an intense traffic surge that must be managed in real time. And events like the Olympics that extend over longer periods present another unique challenge—resiliency. Not only do they involve thousands of simultaneous live feeds, but they also span weeks, with multiple thousands of feeds and millions of digital experiences demanding the highest degree of performance day after day for over a month.
So how does this magic happen?
Behind the Scenes of a Flawless Stream
Streaming live events to millions isn’t as simple as it looks. It takes an impressive combination of tools, infrastructure, and careful planning to make sure everything works smoothly. From encoding and distribution to ensuring quality of service across geographies, every link in the chain must perform perfectly.
Akamai’s role is to provide the world’s most distributed cloud infrastructure that delivers streaming video to customers all around the globe. We typically start working a year in advance with our customers and partners for events the size of the largest football game of the year. We start by establishing a clear vision for the viewer experience, and that drives everything, ranging from technical specifications to rigorous testing, with extensive simulations on every component across different scenarios. We strive to leave no stone unturned, because even a minor disruption—a dropped stream, buffering, or performance dips in specific regions—can result in frustrated viewers and reputational damage for broadcasters.
That’s why another crucial element to delivering a flawless stream is real-time observability—the ability to monitor performance and address issues in real time.
Real-Time Observability: The Key to Live-Streaming Success
Monitoring performance in real time on a platform that is as distributed and as vast as Akamai’s is a tremendous challenge. It requires near-instantaneous gathering and analyzing of log data from across this massive network. The volume of log data itself is mind boggling—we’re talking trillions of lines of log data. (For comparison, a website would typically generate a miniscule fraction of the hundreds of TBs of log data that a high-traffic site can generate daily through global streaming.)
A few companies have tried tackling this challenge in the past, but none were able to deliver solutions that are capable of handling the volume of data at scale while still being affordable–not to mention meeting the real-time requirements of delivering results in less than five seconds end to end.
Fortunately, a partnership between Akamai and Hydrolix has revolutionized real-time observability, enabling customers and partners to cost-effectively monitor quality in real time at a previously unattainable scale. With Akamai’s TrafficPeak, powered by Hydrolix, media providers can access a clear, real-time view of their data, making it easier to detect, diagnose, and fix problems before viewers even notice.
For example, during a recent high-stakes football game, TrafficPeak processed nearly 11 million log records per second, allowing engineers to pinpoint performance bottlenecks within seconds. This rapid insight enabled quick rerouting of traffic away from problematic regions, ensuring uninterrupted service for millions of fans. Without such capabilities, troubleshooting might have taken 20 minutes—a lifetime in live streaming.
Beyond the Big Games: Long-Term Resilience
While single-day events like football championships test the limits of immediate scalability, longer events like the Olympics demand sustained reliability over weeks. In these scenarios, real-time observability helps teams stay on top of thousands of concurrent streams across hundreds of competition events simultaneously.
For instance, during the Olympics in Paris this summer, TrafficPeak enabled teams to identify unusual performance trends on specific devices and proactively address them before they became widespread. It also flagged attempts by malicious actors to compromise streaming origins, enabling immediate countermeasures to protect the stream and its viewers.
And that’s not all: for the first time ever, the Olympics broadcaster will be able to keep the raw data in hot storage for an extended period of time — for years rather than months or even days, as is common with other providers — and analyze historical data points to forecast and plan for future “events of consequence.” Keeping that volume of raw logs is truly unprecedented and opens the door to a level of performance-enhancing analysis that has never been possible before.
The Thanksgiving Parade and Beyond
Events like the Thanksgiving Parade may not have the scale of an Olympics or the intensity of a major football game, but they highlight the need for reliability and simplicity in streaming. Whether it’s ensuring a smooth experience for families gathered around smart TVs or maintaining broadcast-quality streams across mobile devices, the principles of real-time observability remain critical.
As you enjoy the floats, bands, Broadway performers and balloons this year, remember that every second of uninterrupted streaming is made possible by a complex partnership of technologies and teams working behind the scenes. Platforms like Akamai’s TrafficPeak, powered by Hydrolix, exemplify how real-time insights can transform the viewer experience, ensuring that millions can share in the moment without a glitch.
This Thanksgiving, let’s be thankful not just for the parade but for the invisible systems that bring us closer together. Whether it’s a football game, an Olympic marathon, or a holiday tradition, real-time observability is an unsung hero ensuring these moments reach us without fail.
Next Steps
Learn more about Akamai TrafficPeak, powered by Hydrolix, an observability solution that allows you to collect, search, and retain large volumes of log data cost-effectively.
