DStv Now streaming records smashed by the Rugby World Cup final

Surprise, surprise. It turns out that South Africa really loves watching rugby - so much so that Saturday's World Cup Final broke DStv Now streaming records.

By Andy Walker

5 Nov 2019

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Nothing brings our nation together like the green and gold spirit! �� Thank you to everyone who joined us in standing #StrongerTogether in making this magical moment happen! ❤ All the best to our @bokrugby team! ��

A post shared by DStv (@dstvza) on Nov 1, 2019 at 5:55am PDT

According to Multichoice, the owner of DStv and DStv Now, “data carried by content delivery network partners during the Final peaked at more than 500Gbps (more than 4000GB of data per minute).”

In simpler terms, that’s equivalent to a full 4TB hard drive of data transferred every minute.

“Over the course of the day [of the final] we served more than half a million unique users,” the company added.

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Richard Lord 10 Oct 2019

Multichoice notes that this was “double” the number of users compared to the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

That’s equivalent to a full 4TB hard drive of data transferred every minute

This record didn’t come without issue, though. DStv Now’s slew of streaming issues experienced in the early days of the tournament left many users fuming on Twitter.

“We were disappointed at the problems we experienced early in the tournament,” said Niclas Ekdahl, Multichoice’s connected video CEO.

“We’d of course done load testing and provisioned plenty of capacity, but we didn’t anticipate how congestion in one specific system could cascade into others.”

Ekdahl notes that the company will be “ready for 10 times and even 100 times the traffic we’re seeing now” in the future.

About Andy Walker

Camper by day, run-and-gunner by night, Andy is editor at Memeburn and prefers his toast like his coffee -- dark and crunchy. Specialising in spotting the next big Instagram cat star, Andy also dabbles in smartphone and game reviews over on Gearburn.