How to Save Christmas for Beyoncé

When news broke out that Beyoncé was going to perform a halftime show for the Texans/Ravens NFL game on Christmas Day, everyone on the Internet was united in two responses. First was just the Tiffany Pollard “BEYONCÉ?!” meme, and then second was “Okay, that stream had better work perfectly”. Which is fair, because there is no force more powerful (or scarier) on the internet than the Beyhive.

Netflix is going to be streaming the game on Christmas, and obviously, they’ve had an amazing history with internet-breaking Beyoncé moments, with the peak being the legendary Beychella show in 2019, her headlining performance at the 2018 Coachella festival formally known as “Homecoming: A Film By Beyoncé”. But that was a film streaming on-demand, not a live show. And after the recent challenges with the Tyson-Paul fight, some fans are a little bit nervous that they’re not going to get to see every glorious second when Bey performs those Cowboy Carter tracks for the first time. Also, we all know the “Somebody’s getting fired!” video and her expectations of perfection. So we wanted to offer some reassurance about how it’s probably going to be a wonderful Christmas after all.

Now, let’s be clear here: the engineering talent at Netflix is absolutely amazing, and if anybody can nail this, they can. But this stuff is hard. We aren’t claiming to be spilling any trade secrets about what Netflix is working on here, but we do know a little bit about how these things work. Because at Fastly, we’ve helped deliver some of the most-streamed live halftime performances of the last several years and watched the impact of, well, things like Beyonce performances, and learned some lessons along the way. So we wanted to share a bit about what we’ve observed, and what tends to work in these kinds of massive live Internet moments.

Let’s get in formation

First, a little background for those who may be less expert at this stuff. You might ask, “If Beychella was no problem, why would the Christmas halftime be hard?” And the difference is, the Coachella performance happened months before the stream went live for people to watch on demand. That’s very different than enabling tens of millions of people to watch things in real time. Think of it as the difference between a truck delivering 100 bottles of water vs. having to run a live water hose to 100 people at once. One problem is about moving some bits from one place to another, the other problem is keeping a live stream running at high volume at a massive scale.

When there’s not enough water being supplied to all those hoses, everyone gets a little less. That’s when your image quality goes down and Mike Tyson during a fight starts looking more pixelated like Mike Tyson in an old Nintendo game. But there are a couple of tricks that could help keep that problem from happening. Our teams regularly do these for big events, so the smart folks at Netflix are probably doing versions of the same thing.

The first big thing is making sure that, if everybody in one place (say… Houston?) is trying to watch the same video at the same time, all of those different requests can be handled right near them, instead of having to go back to the source. Saving that back-and-forth to get the video clip moving is a huge reduction in the amount of data that needs to be sent overall. That might seem obvious, but because of the way most of the Internet is designed, that’s harder to do than it seems. It requires having really smart computers with tons of power and speed and storage right near all the places where folks need to watch that video. Oh hey, this map has a dot in Houston! And so does Netflix. That’s exactly the kind of technique that smart companies use to be close to their customers.

Secondly, you basically have to be ready to switch things up on the fly. Video streaming has a lot of different pieces — the machines that transmit, transform, compress, enhance, and deliver massive amounts of data instantly. And parts of internet infrastructure around the world will go offline, some of the basic connections between major parts of the internet can actually get “saturated” (think of it as the pipe being full of water so no more can flow through it), or connections might keep running but at super slow speed. In all these cases, you have to actually know there’s a problem so you can fix it, which takes advanced monitoring of every step of the process between your TV or phone and the original data source at the stadium.

And finally, you need to be smart. If everybody is watching the same thing at nearly the same time you can store, or cache, the shared parts closer to those users and make things faster and more efficient. Then, when you do need to move those bits around, you can do it all at once, instead of one at a time for each viewer. And what about video quality: Is everyone even able to watch everything at 4K Ultra High Def? Probably not if they're watching on a phone, or if they’re on a slower connection. Using more advanced monitoring, the system can gather all the signals that indicate exactly what kind of stream is right for each user, and then only deliver exactly the quality they need. Every little bit helps in making sure nobody is suffering from a bad experience.

At game time, what it looks like for events like this is the equivalent of the control room for an old-school rocket launch. There’s a whole bunch of smart engineers all staring at their screens making sure all the systems are working correctly. You know, Houston, rockets, that whole thing. When it all comes together, it is a pretty incredible technical achievement.

Take it to the floor now

Like everybody else, we’re going to be tuned in on Christmas Day, checking for the setlist and hoping for hints that Bey is dropping the third album in the trilogy. But we’ll also be watching in admiration of how damn hard it is behind the scenes to do huge live streaming events at this scale. It’s honestly a big milestone that these moments aren’t relying on being simulcast on traditional television anymore, and we’re excited to see that capability mature to handle some of the biggest events in sports and pop culture. That’s a nice gift for all of us to appreciate this holiday season!