At 9am MT on January 16th, the Edgecast and Limelight Networks will go dark. I saw an employee comment that their career at LLNW and Edgecast was “wasted,” but that is NOT the case. The combination of Limelight Networks, Edgecast as a standalone company before it was acquired, VDMS post the Edgecast acquisition, and finally, Edgio, combining it all, employed thousands of employees over 23 years. Combined, they delivered what I would guess to be tens of billions of streams and helped support some of the most significant streaming events at that moment in time. Most importantly, it allowed many to test, trial, and fine-tune new delivery technologies and figure out how to do it at scale.

What many employees learned from being in the trenches, figuring out how to solve complex problems and supporting customer needs allowed employees to advance their careers in the CDN industry. Many have applied that knowledge to other companies they now work for throughout many different industries, not just video. Don’t allow Edgio’s failure as a company to make you second guess what you know and the experience you have gained. In life, good people give you happiness. The worst people give you a lesson. And the best people give you memories. It’s the same in business. For those who worked for any of the Limelight/Edgecast/VDMS/Edgio companies, you gained friends and, hopefully, learned much about business principles.

While many will want to lay blame for what happened with Edgio, that time has passed. Much, but not all, of Limelight’s management team from 2020 and before, pre-the Edgecast acquisition and rebranding to Edgio, set the company on a path they could not recover from. They made terrible decisions because they didn’t listen to customers, didn’t watch their P&L, didn’t understand the competitive landscape and had egos that were out of touch with reality. New management had no chance to fix what was broken and was set up for failure. Edgio won’t be the last CDN to shut down; by my count, they were about the 25th CDN vendor to be shut down over the past three decades. (see cdnlist.com)

If you are heading to the NAB Show in April, I will give you a free pass for the Streaming Summit; please contact me if you’re interested. Also, next month, I will host a Zoom for anyone looking for tips and tricks on advancing your career in the industry or finding a new job, so follow me on LinkedIn for details soon.

For those looking for new jobs, remember how an elite leader in any domain thinks when it’s time for change. Building a skill takes time and effort, and I will invest the time and be tenaciously persistent. I understand that discomfort is part of the process. If I avoid discomfort, I prevent learning. That’s the mindset of someone who is getting better every day. Educate yourself on what you need to know to get the next job. The financial currency in the business world is information. It’s leverage. Change is inevitable, but progress is optional. Stream on.

FOX shared with me its encoding bitrate ladder for the Super Bowl, with the max bitrate topping out at close to 15Mbps. FOX will capture the game in 1080p, upscale it to 4K HDR, and digitally distribute it to vMVPDs and FOX’s platform. The 2024 Super Bowl stream on Paramount had an average minute audience of 8.5 million and required users to authenticate. As they did in 2023, FOX’s 2025 Super Bowl stream won’t require authentication on FOX’s platform. Over the last three years, viewers of the Super Bowl stream across Paramount, NBC Sports and FOX averaged 15% growth yearly. This blog post details the viewership numbers for the previous Super Bowl streams from 2012-2024.

Amazon’s exclusive NFL AFC Wild Card game is live on Prime, and the company tells me they are seeing record viewership. On Twitter, some viewers reported varied audio and video quality issues, which is expected for an event with a large viewership and a larger number of older devices. Amazon says they do not see any major viewing issues across their audience.

The stream latency on my Fire TV devices averages six seconds compared to Baltimore’s ABC broadcast TV feed. The Prime app on LG TV averages eight seconds. The stream on my MacBook is 30+ seconds behind the stream on Fire TV devices, which isn’t surprising for a video being played in the browser.

On my Fire TV Max devices, the stream took slightly under 14 seconds to start, but testing again later in the game, the time to first frame (TTFF) was down to 3 seconds. On my iPad and iPhone, I experienced no quality issues. Amazon’s goal for live events is to have latency under 10 seconds, which I’ve seen on all devices outside the desktop. I understand that Amazon’s Sye tech isn’t used for delivering streams to desktop computers, so a higher latency is expected. Testing pirated streams, latency averages more than 90 seconds behind Amazon’s stream.

Speaking of Sye, I’m playing the game from three Fire TV Max devices on three TVs, and the frame sync on all of them is perfect. I’ve confirmed that all three are getting Sye streams, which would explain the great experience. Comments on others’ streaming experiences can be seen on this LinkedIn post.

Final viewership numbers are out for the NFL’s Christmas day games, with an AMA of 31.3 million global viewership for the Ravens-Texans game, with 24.3 million coming from the US. The number includes Netflix’s stream, CBS local market viewing and NFL+ mobile viewing from NFL. While many will want to compare these numbers to the streaming of previous NFL games, it’s hard to make a fair comparison.

The numbers reported take Nielsen’s Live Streaming Measurement service and Netflix’s first-party streaming data to measure viewership. AMA viewership figures are based on National Live + SD from Nielsen in the US, which includes out-of-home viewing, CBS local market viewing, NFL+, and mobile and web viewing across Netflix. International data is based on 1st party Netflix Live + 1 data for TV, mobile and web, along with NFL reported viewing for the NFL’s international distributors and NFL Game Pass outside of the US.

You can see my post here that lists “The Largest Live Streaming Events in History and How They Are Measured.” I see some comparing this to the Super Bowl, but from a streaming standpoint, the Super Bowl’s AMA viewership is much smaller. You can see a breakdown of those numbers here, “Thirteen Years of Super Bowl Streaming Viewership Stats, 2012-2024.”

With Netflix securing the exclusive U.S. rights to the FIFA Women’s World Cup for 2027 and 2031, here’s a breakdown of previous TV and streaming viewership in 2023, 2019 and 2015.

⚽ 𝗜𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯, the Women’s World Cup stage match, in which the United States tied with the Netherlands, 𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗱 𝟲.𝟰 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗿𝘀 on FOX. It was the most-watched game in 2023 since the U.S. Women’s Team was knocked out in round 16, resulting in the 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗖𝘂𝗽 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝟮.𝟮 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 viewers across FOX, Telemundo, Universo and Peacock.
⚽ 𝗜𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟵, the Women’s World Cup final, in which the United States beat the Netherlands, drew 𝟭𝟯.𝟵 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗿𝘀 on FOX and had 𝟮𝟴𝟵,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 the game (AMA). Telemundo added 1.6 million viewers.
⚽ 𝗜𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟱, the Women’s World Cup final, in which the United States beat Japan, 𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗱 𝟭𝟲 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗿𝘀 on FOX, 𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝟮𝟯 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 and had 𝟳𝟮,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗮𝗺𝗲 (AMA). Telemundo added 1.2 million viewers.

Due to the different locations of the tournament, viewership is impacted by the start times. The 2023 final started at 6am ET, the 2019 final started at 11am ET, and the 2015 final began at 7pm ET.

Netflix has secured the exclusive U.S. rights to the FIFA Women’s World Cup for 2027 and 2031 and will include both English and Spanish telecasts. The 32-team, 64-game tournament in 2027 will be played in July in Brazil.

Some have suggested that with Netflix’s exclusive deal for the U.S. broadcast rights moving from TV to streaming, FIFA and U.S. Soccer risk losing an American audience. However, when looking at the subscriber numbers of the two, I don’t see how they came to that conclusion. At the end of the third quarter of 2024, Netflix had 66.7 million paid subscribers in the U.S. At the end of 2024, it is estimated that there will be 65-70 million pay TV households in the U.S. At the current cord-cutting rate, Netflix will have more U.S. subscribers than pay TV by 2027.

We don’t know how much Netflix paid for the rights, but the 𝗕𝗕𝗖 𝘀𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗱 £𝟵 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗨𝗞 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗜𝗧𝗩. Last year, FIFA’s chief partnerships and media officer threatened not to broadcast the FIFA Women’s World Cup in the big five European countries, saying the bids were too low and “unacceptable.” Months later, the international soccer federation announced that it had agreed to extend its partnership with the European Broadcasting Union, enabling the tournament to be shown across EBU’s free-to-air-linear network across 34 European territories. The value of the deal was not disclosed.

As we end the year, I want to thank all those who read my content and contributed to the discussions. I’ll end 2024 with almost 9 million impressions on LinkedIn, with 932,000 members reached. Adding in more than 2 million impressions from my blog, 30,000 downloads of my podcast and an unknown amount of traffic from Twitter, that’s over 12 million impressions across all platforms. On LinkedIn, nine posts about Netflix generated more than 1 million impressions combined, and ten posts about the CDN industry generated 1 million impressions as well. Posts about earnings numbers and details from filings also contributed a large percentage of impressions.

I started my blog 17 years ago, and across the blog, LinkedIn, Twitter and my podcast, my content has always been 100% free to read. Over that time, many have tried to convince me to monetize my content via paywalls, charging for substack newsletters or selling limited access. That’s not why I do this. Not everyone is driven by the need to monetize content. I play the long game, chess over checkers. If you showcase your expertise and spend the time to produce quality content, great opportunities will come your way.

Some think I am crazy to have published my cell phone number publicly for 20 years and, on average, reply to all calls and emails within 24 hours. However, as I wrote in a blog post entitled “Tips On How To Build A Successful Personal Brand And Make It Into A Business,” there is no shortcut to building a personal brand. You either put in the work or you don’t. You can read that blog post here: https://lnkd.in/ejG48PrS

The industry has taken great care of me over the past three decades, for which I am grateful. I feel a sense of responsibility to help grow the industry by doing my best to inform, educate and empower others, connecting them to those smarter than myself. Good leaders invest in people, not ideas, and they understand that the progress of one is the progress of all. For all those who have contributed to the discussions, pointed out my spelling mistakes, sent me messages thanking me for my posts and helped educate me on topics they know better than myself – I thank you. Happy Holidays! 🎅 🎄 🎁

On Christmas, Netflix said US viewership of its NFL games peaked with the Beyonce Bowl at 27 million viewers. The Ravens-Texans game had 24.3 million AMA, and the Chiefs-Steelers matchup came in at 24.1 million AMA. Global ratings and additional US insights will be released on December 31. The AMA (average minute audience) viewership figures are based on Fast National Live + Same Day data from Nielsen, which includes out-of-home viewing and CBS local market viewing along with mobile and web data from Netflix and NFL+ mobile viewing from NFL.

To see how this compares to previous live-streaming events, see my post that lists the top 20 largest events. A breakdown of the Super Bowl streaming viewership numbers can be found here.