The Super Bowl was available for free streaming this year, with no pay TV authentication required. NBC’s decision certainly made the game accessible for many fans who couldn’t be near a TV. Akamai powered that streaming, and made a few stats available about big game performance.In a blog post, John Bishop, Akamai’s vice president and CTO for its Media Business Unit, said that the NBC Sports Live Extra stream averaged 800,000 viewers per minute, with a peak performance of 1.3 million concurrent users.A few days prior to the game, Bishop wrote that Akamai would use 160,000 edge servers distributed in over 1,200 networks to stream the Super Bowl. Algorithms selected the best route for each stream, he noted.
