Media and Streaming Engineering: Building for Peak Load
When Super Bowl LVIII streamed on CBS in 2024, peak concurrent viewers hit 123 million — a number that isn't a KPI, it's a physics problem. Disney+'s Ahsoka finale generated 14 million account logins in a 15-minute window. Netflix's Tyson-Paul fight in late 2024 failed visibly on Twitter because the streaming stack buckled at ~60 million concurrent streams. Media engineering is not optimizing for average throughput. It's optimizing for the one hour per quarter where your graphs go vertical.
The companies that do this well share a specific team shape, a specific release cadence, and a specific set of measurement habits that don't apply to most B2B SaaS. Pulling DORA metrics off a streaming platform and comparing them to a CRM is apples and typhoons. This is a field guide for the engineering leaders who run — or are about to run — a media platform through peak.