Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: YouTube’s NFL livestream, and the story behind an AI short film.

How YouTube plans to pull off Friday’s NFL live game

This year, football season kicks off with a twist: Following tonight’s season opener, YouTube will stream the NFL’s first Friday game of the season — a face-off between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Kansas City Chiefs broadcast live from São Paulo, Brazil — for free to a global audience this Friday.

It’s the first time YouTube has hosted such a high-caliber US sports event in front of the paywall, and the Google-owned video service is pulling out all the bells and whistles for the occasion. There will be drones. There will be over 50 cameras. Karol G will perform the halftime show. And in addition to live commentary from broadcast veteran Rich Eisen and Hall of Famer Kurt Warner, fans will also be able to watch the game with livestreams from YouTube creators like IShowSpeed and SKabeche. 

But that’s only half the story. I’ve had the chance to exclusively talk to some of the folks at YouTube involved in Friday’s event over the last couple of weeks about how the broadcast came together. That’s how I learned that there’s not just a plan B and a plan C to deal with unforeseen network outages, but even a last-resort, Hail Mary fallback solution internally known as the “Doomsday Armageddon scenario.”

YouTube has been running tests for weeks

To pull off such a high-level event, YouTube has brought on NBC as a production partner. The broadcaster aired the Brazil NFL game on Peacock in 2024 and is handling much of the on-location production work for YouTube. “A lot of the gear and equipment that NBC used last year is coming back this year,” says YouTube sports partner engagement manager Adam Masterson. That includes what’s known in the broadcast industry as a flypack solution — basically, a studio in a box (okay, many boxes) that you can ship to places where rolling up with a production truck just isn’t feasible — custom-designed for this location. 

“NBC is the greatest shipping production company in the world because of the Olympics,” Masterson explains.

Together, the two companies built out a pop-up production compound in São Paulo over the past couple of weeks, which has been online and running daily test transmissions since late August. These include testing every camera and all the local equipment, but also sending test broadcasts back to YouTube in the United States. Turns out that’s not quite as simple as just going to YouTube and clicking the “Go live” button, as regular creators do.

“Getting a game from the stadium in Brazil back to YouTube TV for this one-time-only event, through NBC, requires some bespoke architecture,” Masterson says. The raw broadcast feed is delivered via what Masterson calls “custom fiber solutions” to an NBC facility in Stamford, Connecticut. From there, it’s being sent to NBC’s 30 Rock studio in New York for production control, then to another NBC facility in Colorado, from where it is being handed over to YouTube.

Sounds complicated? That’s why YouTube isn’t leaving anything to fate. In addition to the fiber cables, there will also be a satellite link on standby as a backup solution to get that feed to NBC. If all that fails, there’s a plan C: an internet-based video link, known as an SRT feed, to a local YouTube data center in Brazil, effectively bypassing NBC altogether. 

And yes, there is always that plan D: “If our fiber goes bad, and if our satellite goes bad, and God forbid the SRT solution goes bad, we have something called our Doomsday Armageddon scenario, which is basically a guy with a camera and a LiveU backpack,” Masterson says. This would essentially allow YouTube to go live with a single camera feed, produced on the fly by one camera operator, and streamed over a cellular connection, much in the same way traditional broadcasters sometimes go live from areas of civil unrest. 

YouTube and NBC have been testing the links between their facilities since late July, and YouTube’s own engineers have been busy testing everything from ingestion to transcoding and video quality control for weeks as well. “We spent a lot of time preparing for this,” says YouTube infrastructure director Nils Krahnstoever, who admits that his team nonetheless gets butterflies ahead of an event of this magnitude.

“Our state is always uncomfortably excited,” Krahnstoever quips, adding: “I'm very confident that we're ready.”

YouTube’s long history in live video 

This isn’t exactly YouTube’s first rodeo when it comes to live events. The service has dabbled in live video since 2008, and has officially supported livestreaming since 2012 — the year Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a plane at the edge of space, resulting in 8 million concurrent livestreams. “He was really a hero to us in many ways,” Krahnstoever says about the recently deceased skydiver.

Since then, YouTube has hosted a number of high-profile live events, including the London Olympics, the Clinton-Trump debate (close to 2 million concurrent viewers across multiple streams), an Andrea Bocelli livestream (2.8 million concurrent viewers), and Super Bowl LVIII on YouTube TV (8 million concurrent viewers). The service has also been streaming soccer matches in Brazil to millions of viewers, which has helped build out some of the local infrastructure that is being utilized for this week’s event.

Massive livestreams can be a challenge for any platform. Just ask Netflix, which stumbled badly with some of its early live events. An additional challenge for YouTube is that the platform is open to almost anyone — which can lead to unexpected surprises. 

When India streamed its 2023 moon landing on YouTube, there was no thought of giving Google a heads-up. With more than 8 million viewers, it became the biggest live event in front of the paywall by peak concurrent views to date — surprising everyone at YouTube. “It wasn't until we came in the next morning and saw our metrics that [we realized that] something big had happened,” says YouTube infrastructure engineering manager Kirk Haller.

Haller and Krahnstoever attribute a lot of YouTube’s resilience to it being a platform that is open to everyone and everything. At any given moment, there are countless livestreams, ranging from live news to esports to eagle cams and Lofi Girl. And sure, massive live events like Friday’s NFL game do get extra support, fallback solutions, and dedicated war rooms. But ultimately, the streaming infrastructure is the same as the one powering some vlogger you’ve never heard of.

“If anybody wants to livestream on YouTube, it's the same platform that is used for YouTube TV and these other tentpole events,” Krahnstoever says.

That shared infrastructure includes YouTube’s custom-designed transcoder hardware and its own global content delivery network. But there’s also a lot of cross-pollination with regard to more visible features between user-generated content and big live events. 

YouTube began supporting low-latency streams with 60fps to better cater to gamers. Now that’s coming in handy for live sports as well. And the service developed its multi-view feature for live sports, but is now using the same compositing tech behind the scenes to allow creators to add remote guests to their livestreams.

“Generally, we're trying to build for reuse,” says YouTube VP Christian Oestlien. “We want to make sure that we're not just building bespoke features that rot away in one particular part of our service.”

40 billion hours of sports every year

Oestlien was instrumental to the launch of YouTube TV eight years ago, and he credits the pay TV service with opening the doors to get more sports onto YouTube in general — including Friday's game. “YouTube TV really helped us when we started to have more direct conversations with league partners like the NFL and media rights holders,” he says.

One example is NFL Sunday Ticket, which YouTube TV has been carrying since 2023. Being able to prove to the league that YouTube could stream those games to its subscribers every week ultimately helped seal the deal for Friday’s game.

Now, Oestlien hopes that this game will be another proof point, and help convince others to bring huge global live events to YouTube as well. “It will be a really great opportunity for us to [show] that we can deliver these seminal watercooler moments,” he says. “These very large tentpole events that are such a big part of the culture.”

However, YouTube doesn’t just want to be another broadcaster, an app that replaces your cable feed. Instead, it aims to be a platform that brings in new audiences, including viewers that sports leagues haven’t been able to reach. “All this creator work we're doing is going to bring in a whole new generation into the NFL,” Oestlien says.

If all goes well, that will lead to additional partnerships with other leagues, and more massive live events. That’s in addition to the 40 billion hours of live and on-demand sports programming that is already being consumed on YouTube per year.

In other words: A lot is riding on Friday’s game for YouTube. Oestlien is watching the action live in São Paulo, and confesses that it will be tense, no matter what happens on the field. “When you shift from a sports fan to somebody who's delivering sports programming, the game becomes much more than just the sport that you're passionate about,” he says. “I'm a nervous wreck when these games happen.”

He’s being joined on location by Masterson and a handful of other YouTube team members, while many more are following the action — and all the metrics associated with the livestream — from YouTube’s offices back in the US. And when the game is over, the team has to immediately turn around and work on the next big thing: NFL Sunday Ticket, which starts two days later. 

Masterson even scheduled his flight so he could be back at his desk on Sunday. Eventually, he hopes that big tentpole events like Friday’s game will be just that for his team: a regular day at the office.

“There's a lot of anxiety and a lot of excitement around this one event,” Masterson says. “I want to wake up one day and have it feel like just another day.”

This AI film racked up 12 million views within hours. Here’s how it was made.

China’s state broadcaster CCTV recently commissioned a couple of AI short films for its online celebration of the Qixi festival, which is basically the local equivalent of Valentine’s Day. One of the artists who took part in this was Norway-based visual designer Edmond Yang, whose animated short Unforgotten - When Romeo meets Zhu Yingtai racked up almost 12 million views on CCTV’s website within hours.

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When I chatted with Yang earlier this week, he told me that he got the brief for the short film less than two weeks before its August 28 premiere date. The brief tasked him with combining the Chinese legend of the Butterfly Lovers with the story of Romeo and Juliet – two stories that have very similar motives, down to the tragic death of each couple. “So I came with this idea: What if they just met each other in the afterlife,” he recalled.

Yang then spent a couple days working on the script, and six days (plus a couple of sleepless nights) to generate and edit it. However, he didn’t rely entirely on generative AI. “The music was composed by a couple of friends of mine in China, and the voices are also real actresses and actors,” he said.

Yang told me that he had to generate about 10-20 10-second clips for every 5 seconds of footage that made it into the final film – a process that involved a lot of trial and error. “You would lie if you said you have total control and freedom with AI,” he said. “It kind of works like a sparring partner that does not always want to do what you want to do.”

“You just need to burn credits in order to see what works,” he added.

Having started to play with generative AI since the early days of Midjourney, Yang described himself as an experienced prompter. But even for someone like him, the process can have its frustrating moments. “You're just banging your head into the wall sometimes,” he told me.

Yang wasn’t a filmmaker before he started to use AI, but he did produce a few ads and music videos. Having experience with traditional tools, he told me that there would be no way for a single creator to make a film like this in less than two weeks, much less for this budget: Yang estimated that he used around $1200 in AI credits for the entire film.

Going forward, Yang plans to double down on storytelling, and perhaps eventually even do a feature film. Except, at the speed generative AI tools are evolving, that may be hard to do. What if he started using one model, and then it got replaced by another a month or two later?

Added Yang: “It’s a full-time job just to try out the new stuff.”

What else

Dolby Vision 2 is here. The new iteration of Dolby Vision is supposed to make motion smoothing less painful, among other things.

Google launches AI program for filmmakers. Flow Sessions includes mentoring as well as unlimited access to Google’s AI film-making tool Flow.

Netflix now lets you clip your favorite scenes. The streamer’s Moments feature, which lets users share viral scenes, now comes with a simple video editor of sorts.

Google’s new Home Speaker is coming next month. The company has teased some smart home updates for October 2, when it will likely also unveil its new Home Speaker.

Streaming overtakes traditional TV in Germany. 87% of Germans now stream movies and TV shows, according to a new survey.

Sonos scores new win in legal fight against Google. An appeals court has sided with the smart speaker maker, throwing out a prior judgement in favor of Google.

Roku is bringing FAST channels to the UK. A first batch of 40 channels is going live in the British version of the Roku Channel next month.

Scoop: Google Home Premium service confirmed. Earlier this week, Android Headlines reported that Google will replace its existing Nest Aware service with a broader Google Home Premium plan. Today, Google essentially confirmed the new service by mentioning it in a job offer.

That’s it

This issue ran very long, so I’ll keep it short: Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

And many thanks to Frequency for sponsoring this issue of Lowpass.