Hosting the World’s Largest Paid Online Concert on AWS

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As virtual events have become more ubiquitous in the last year, so has the demand for large-scale and innovative digital experiences. Whether the interactions involve being seen and heard by their favorite band, sports team or celebrity, being able to bring people closer together and reflect the energy of a live venue is a daunting task. 

At Kiswe, one of the ways we wanted to build a unique virtual experience was by hosting a ticketed live streaming event for viewers around the world. Not just any virtual concert, but one with BTS--one of the biggest bands in the world with an enormous global fan base. With any major live-streamed event, elasticity and latency remain a big challenge. We also required each viewer to have a paid ticket, which added additional security and verification needs. 

Partnering With AWS

We utilized a suite of Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions in order to meet demand and scale the incoming traffic, which resulted in over 756,000 viewers tuning into the live concert broadcasting from South Korea. Consequently, the event broke the Guinness World Record for the largest live streaming ticketed concert. Amazon’s CloudFront was integral to the success as its fast content delivery network service delivered data, video applications and APIs with low latency and high transfer speeds. We were also able to process millions of API calls and support billions of chat messages globally as enthusiastic fans shared their real-time reactions during the show. 

We also used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud—to scale its events based on demand and enable low-latency viewing around the world. We supported this infrastructure using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance, and Elastic Load Balancing, which automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets. Hosting this infrastructure on AWS enabled us to deploy changes rapidly. 

Using a combination of AWS services, we can manage each aspect of our live streaming events seamlessly, whether the team is adding the monitoring of Amazon CloudWatch—a monitoring and observability service—onto Amazon CloudFront distribution or performing cost accounting for an individual event. We continue to host large-scale global concerts and other virtual events using Amazon CloudFront and Amazon EC2. 

As we move forward, we aim to increase interactivity through live cheering and video functions that allow fans to contribute to live shows in meaningful ways.

View Kiswe's AWS Partner Network Profile→