The football season is starting with a new twist this year: After tonight’s opener, YouTube has announced that it will stream the game. stream the NFL’s first Friday game of the season — a face-off between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Kansas City Chiefs broadcast live from São Paulo, Brazil — for free to a global audience this Friday.
YouTube, owned by Google, is putting on a show of its own. It will host a US sporting event with prestigious athletes in front if the paywall. Drones will be used. Over 50 cameras will be used. Karol will be performing at the halftime. Rich Eisen, a broadcasting veteran and Hall of Famer Kurt Warner will provide live commentary. In addition, YouTube creators IShowSpeed and SKabeche are providing live streams of the match.
That’s not the whole story. In the last few weeks I have had the exclusive opportunity to talk with YouTube staffers involved in this event to learn how it was broadcast. It was through this conversation that I discovered there is not only a Plan B or C, but also a Hail Mary, last resort, fallback option known internally as the “Doomsday Armageddon scenario.”
YouTube is testing its services since weeks
YouTube teamed up with NBC, a leading production company in the US to pull off this high-profile event. This broadcaster will be handling the majority of YouTube’s on-location work. In 2024, they will air the Brazil NFL match on Peacock. “A lot of the gear and equipment that NBC used last year is coming back this year,” Adam Masterson, YouTube’s sports partner engagement manager. That includes what’s known in the broadcast industry as a flypack solution — basically, a studio in a box (okay, many boxes) that you can ship to places where rolling up with a production truck just isn’t feasible — custom-designed This location is located.
“NBC is the greatest shipping production company in the world because of the Olympics,” Masterson explains.
Together, the two companies built out a pop-up production compound in São Paulo over the past couple of weeks, which has been online and running daily test transmissions since late August. The tests include checking every camera, all local equipment and sending broadcasts from the United States to YouTube. The process is not as easy as clicking the YouTube button. “Go live” Click the button as you would with any other creator.
“Getting a game from the stadium in Brazil back to YouTube TV for this one-time-only event, through NBC, requires some bespoke architecture,” Masterson says. Masterson describes the raw feed as being delivered by what Masterson refers to “custom fiber solutions” Stamford in Connecticut, to an NBC facility. The video is then sent on to NBC 30 Rock in New York, where production will be controlled, and finally to another NBC studio in Colorado. From there it will go to YouTube.
Does that sound complicated? YouTube doesn’t leave anything up to chance. There will be a back-up satellite connection in addition to fiber cables to deliver the feed to NBC. Plan C is an internet video link. SRT NBC is effectively bypassed by sending the feed to a Brazilian YouTube datacenter.
Plan D is always there. “If our fiber goes bad, and if our satellite goes bad, and God forbid the SRT solution goes bad, we have something called our Doomsday Armageddon scenario, which is basically a guy with a camera and a LiveU backpack,” Masterson confirms. It would allow YouTube to stream live a video feed produced by a camera operator on-the-fly, over a mobile connection. This is similar to how traditional broadcasters do it. go live from areas of civil unrest.
YouTube and NBC began testing their links in late July. YouTube’s engineers, meanwhile, have been busy for weeks testing everything from video transcoding to quality control and the uploading of videos. “We spent a lot of time preparing for this,” Nils Krahnstoever is the YouTube Infrastructure Director. He admits his team gets butterflies before an event this big.
“Our state is always uncomfortably excited,” Krahnstoever quips, adding: “I’m very confident that we’re ready.”
YouTube has a long tradition of live streaming
YouTube has been streaming live video since 2008. The service has dabbled in live video since 2008, and has officially supported livestreaming since 2012 — the year Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a plane at the edge of space, resulting in 8 million concurrent livestreams. “He was really a hero to us in many ways,” Krahnstoever’s comments about the skydiver who died recently.
YouTube TV has been hosting a variety of live events since then. These include the London Olympics (with close to 2,000,000 concurrent viewers across several streams), the Andrea Bocelli Livestream (2.8,000,000 concurrent viewers) and the Super Bowl LVIII (8,000,000 concurrent viewers). It has been used to stream soccer games in Brazil, which have attracted millions of viewers. The infrastructure for the Super Bowl LVIII event was built using this local infrastructure.
Livestreaming massive events can pose a problem for any platform. Netflix had a bad experience with some of its early live events. An additional challenge for YouTube is that the platform is open to almost anyone — which can lead to unexpected surprises.
Google was not notified when India broadcast its moon landing in 2023 on YouTube. With more than 8 million viewers, it became the biggest live event in front of the paywall by peak concurrent views to date — surprising everyone at YouTube. “It wasn’t until we came in the next morning and saw our metrics that [we realized that] something big had happened,” Kirk Haller is the YouTube Infrastructure Engineering Manager.
Haller and Krahnstoever believe that YouTube’s success is due to its openness to all. There are many livestreams available at any time, from news, to esports, to eaglecams. Lofi Girl. Sure, large-scale live events, like the NFL match on Friday, get additional support, alternative solutions and war rooms. The infrastructure that supports streaming is identical to the one used by some unknown vlogger.
“If anybody wants to livestream on YouTube, it’s the same platform that is used for YouTube TV and these other tentpole events,” Krahnstoever says.
YouTube is part of the shared infrastructure. custom-designed transcoder hardware and its global content delivery networks. It’s not just about the visible aspects of user-generated material and live events.
YouTube now supports low-latency 60fps streams to cater better to gamers. It’s also coming in handy with live sports. The service has developed its multiview feature to be used for live sports. But it is also using the same technology behind the scenes that allows creators to create. add remote guests Livestreams are available.
“Generally, we’re trying to build for reuse,” says YouTube VP Christian Oestlien. “We want to make sure that we’re not just building bespoke features that rot away in one particular part of our service.”
Sports – 40 Billion Hours of Sport Every Year
Oestlien was instrumental to the launch of YouTube TV eight years ago, and he credits the pay TV service with opening the doors to get more sports onto YouTube in general — including Friday’s game. “YouTube TV really helped us when we started to have more direct conversations with league partners like the NFL and media rights holders,” He says.
YouTube TV’s NFL Sunday Ticket is a good example. It has carried the NFL Sunday Ticket since 2023. It was important to convince the NFL that YouTube TV could broadcast the game every week.
Oestlien now hopes this game will help convince other people to bring global live events on YouTube. “It will be a really great opportunity for us to [show] that we can deliver these seminal watercooler moments,” He says. “These very large tentpole events that are such a big part of the culture.”
YouTube does not want to just be another app, a replacement for your cable. It aims to become a platform for reaching new audiences. This includes viewers who sports leagues are unable to reach. “All this creator work we’re doing is going to bring in a whole new generation into the NFL,” Oestlien says.
It’s possible that this will result in more live events and partnerships with other leagues. This is in addition to 40 billion hours YouTube already consumes millions of hours per year in live and on demand sports content.
It’s clear that the game of Friday will be a crucial one for YouTube. Oestlien is watching the action live in São Paulo, and confesses that it will be tense, no matter what happens on the field. “When you shift from a sports fan to somebody who’s delivering sports programming, the game becomes much more than just the sport that you’re passionate about,” He says. “I’m a nervous wreck when these games happen.”
He’s being joined on location by Masterson and a handful of other YouTube team members, while many more are following the action — and all the metrics associated with the livestream — from YouTube’s offices back in the US. After the game, they have to turn back around and start working on NFL Sunday Ticket which begins two days later.
Masterson scheduled his return flight to ensure he was back in his office on Sunday. He eventually hopes that the big tentpoles like Friday’s match will just be a normal day for his staff: an office.
“There’s a lot of anxiety and a lot of excitement around this one event,” Masterson Says “I want to wake up one day and have it feel like just another day.”
It is not a good idea to use this. Lowpass by Janko RoettgersA syndicated column that focuses on the intersection between tech and entertainment. The Verge Subscribers receive an email every week.
