How Hulu Scaled Its Live Streaming for the Super Bowl: Inside the War Room
This article details how Hulu's Beijing engineering teams prepared, scaled, and operated the live streaming infrastructure for the 2024 Super Bowl, handling a 20% traffic surge with advanced load‑testing, auto‑scaling, and coordinated on‑call support to ensure a flawless broadcast.
Super Bowl, the NFL championship, is the most‑watched TV program in the United States; this year the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 38‑35.
Hulu launched its Live service in 2017 and began supporting Super Bowl streams in 2018, with engineers from the Beijing office involved from the start.
The Beijing teams responsible for user authentication, media engineering and content discovery built a “War Room” to provide round‑the‑clock technical support for the massive concurrent traffic.
After six years of refining its live‑streaming platform, Hulu entered this year’s event with more thorough load‑testing and required fewer on‑call staff, though key engineers remained on standby.
Traffic for the 2024 Super Bowl grew 20 % over the previous year, putting high demands on capacity planning, auto‑scaling, service strategy, user‑experience guarantees and incident response.
Both online and offline on‑call personnel coordinated their efforts to ensure the live broadcast completed smoothly.
The Super Bowl also attracts premium advertising; Disney aired a special ad celebrating its 100‑year legacy during the game.
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