Twitch faced significant traffic spikes, sometimes 20 times higher than normal, which required them to implement hacks like turning dynamic pages into static ones to handle the load during popular streams.

At Twitch, we learned that the video system doesn't know how many viewers are waiting before a stream starts, but the website does. By communicating this information, we could pre-populate the stream to the necessary video servers before going live.

YouTube's infrastructure must handle over 100 billion views a day and 1 million hours of video uploads, which is a monumental task.

When we launched our beta, we underestimated the demand and ran out of bandwidth, leading a Cornell student to host our site temporarily while we resolved the issue.

YouTube's live streaming has potential because it combines video on demand with real-time interaction, allowing creators to build a community by engaging with viewers instantly.

In 2005, it became common to see people huddled around laptops watching the latest viral videos, marking a dawning era of the internet, with videos like a Saturday Night Live clip and a Nike ad reaching a million views, while we also realized that YouTube was consuming a significant portion of the internet's bandwidth, a technical achievement that many didn't fully understand at the time.

The Justin.tv founders faced a critical situation when their video system went down, and they had to find a way to contact their missing team member quickly.

After launching the live streaming product, we realized it didn't address any real pain points, resulting in only 200 users after three months.

The infrastructure behind services like YouTube, Netflix, and Twitch is incredibly complex, requiring immense engineering efforts to deliver content efficiently.