[BTS Comeback] "300 Million Viewers Worldwide at Once" — Powered by AWS Cloud Infrastructure

According to Financial News, the BTS comeback concert "Arirang (ARIRANG)," to be held on the 21st at Gwanghwamun in Seoul, will be broadcast live on Netflix to more than 300 million subscribers worldwide. Behind this global live streaming effort, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is providing the cloud technology backbone.
The Information Technology (IT) industry said on the 20th that, to enable large-scale live streaming, Netflix has spent the past three years upgrading its own live streaming–dedicated infrastructure built on AWS.
Unlike Video on Demand (VOD), where data is pre-distributed across servers, live streaming must capture video signals from the event site in real time and deliver them simultaneously to hundreds of millions of devices. The core challenge is to withstand the traffic surge at the moment the event begins and maintain a single uninterrupted stream.
According to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the technical backbone of this Gwanghwamun live broadcast is "error-free signal delivery" and "real-time cloud encoding."
Video feeds from the concert venue will be received simultaneously through two geographically separate AWS Regions and four independent network paths. By applying the broadcast industry standard SMPTE ST 2022-7 protocol, the system can instantly reroute traffic if one path fails, at a level where viewers will not notice any disruption.
The transmitted source video is first ingested by AWS Elemental MediaConnect, then processed through AWS Elemental MediaLive.
In the cloud, the stream is converted in real time from standard definition (SD) up to UHD quality, depending on each viewer’s device performance and internet conditions. Multiple language subtitles and audio tracks are added on top at the same time.
Global distribution is handled by Netflix’s own Content Delivery Network (CDN), Open Connect. More than 18,000 servers deployed across 6,000 locations worldwide deliver data from the point closest to each viewer.
System operators will monitor 38 million events per second in real time and automatically scale computing resources when traffic surges.
AWS views this live broadcast as a technological milestone, where content originating in Korea travels over a global cloud network and reaches fans around the world with virtually no delay. As more than 300 million subscribers are able to experience the same concert at the same time, the value of live streaming within the platform industry is expected to grow even further.
An AWS representative said, "Korea, with its world-class internet infrastructure, is a critical market for validating live streaming quality," adding, "By lowering the technical and cost barriers to simultaneous global live broadcasts through cloud-based infrastructure, we have created a pathway for Korean popular music (K-pop) and other Korean content creators to connect with viewers around the world in real time."

wongood@fnnews.com Reporter Joo Won-gyu Reporter