The Unseen Battleground: An Architect’s Retro on Streaming 1 Billion Minutes of Live Sports

Conviva streamed 1 billion minutes of live sports by building a hyper-scale, real-time data platform. Using Kafka for ingestion, Spark Streaming for processing, Druid for real-time queries, and Hadoop for historical storage, the team balanced speed, accuracy, and cost. Key lessons: prioritize team velocity, verify every data point, and treat efficiency as a core feature. Small errors matter at scale—precision is everything.