On August 28th, 2022, when India was playing against Pakistan at Asia Cup T20 Championship in Dubai, more than 1.3 crore or 13 million people were concurrently watching the match on the Disney+Hotstar OTT app, on a global level.

10 million+ concurrent viewers, on a single mobile app, with a global audience is in fact, not a record. It’s 25.3 million concurrent viewers on Disney+Hotstar App, which happened in 2019 during India vs New Zealand World Cup Semi-Final match.

A world record, because active viewers on a single mobile app, at this scale and magnitude have seldom happened. 

How did Disney+Hotstar manage this feat? 

In this blog, we will discuss how Disney+Hotstar ensures this incredible scalability of the app by understanding and decoding its system architecture, concurrency, scalability models and more. 

But first, a brief introduction to the world’s second-biggest, and India’s #1 OTT platform: Disney+Hotstar.

Disney+Hotstar: An introduction

The journey started with the launch of the Hotstar app, in 2015, which was developed by Star India. The 2015 Cricket World Cup was about to start, along with the 2015 IPL tournament, and Star network wanted to fully capitalize on the insane viewership.

While Hotstar generated massive 345 million views for World Cup, 200 million views were generated for the IPL Tournament.

This was before the Jio launch, which happened in 2016. And watching TV series and matches on the mobile was still at a nascent stage. The foundation was set.

The introduction of Reliance Jio’s telecom network changed Internet usage in India, and this changed everything for Hotstar.