Customer Case Study

Scaling A Live Stream to 5 Million Users

Hotstar owns the exclusive online streaming rights to the IPL, which is India’s most popular cricket league.  Being that cricket is arguably India’s most popular sport and streaming is the most popular way to view sports in India, Hotstar has in turn become one of the largest streaming services in the world.   Given the importance of the IPL games, there is little room for error and customers are looking for a flawless service to deliver this all-important sporting experience.

  • Location: India
  • Company Size: 10,000+
  • Daily Concurrent Users: 5M+
  • Industry: Media
  • Tool of choice: Gatling
The Challenge

Streaming can't wait

Given the importance of the IPL, there were projections that over 5 million users would be streaming the event online.  While Hotstar was experienced in load testing with Gatling from previous events, the number of servers required to be started to support this test was massive – over 1,000.  Additionally, finding a way to consolidate the metrics from all of these servers to create a consolidated, accurate report would be a herculean effort in itself.

The Solution

Performance by design

With an all important event approaching and little margin for error, Hotstar partnered with Flood to run their mass scale Gatling scripts via AWS.   With the support of Flood, Hotstar was able to test with over 5 million concurrent users, to massive success.  After the IPL league matches in April 2018, Hotstar was named as one of largest streaming services ever, outreaching even Donald Trump’s Presidential Inaguration with 5.5 million concurrent viewers to 4.8 million.

Products Used

Gatling

Gatling is a high performing, open source load testing tool. Gatling simulates load at the protocol level, with a strong focus on web-based applications and related protocols.

Grid

Flood Grid handles deploying load generators such as JMeter or Element to the cloud at the press of a button, so that you can focus on results.

Take the next step

Tell us what you’re solving for and our customer success team will help you find the best solution.