livestream is quite different from streaming pre-processed video, so I'm not surprised by the scaling issues

i was mildly interested and managed to find a pirate livestream, it didn't have buffering issues lol

Well the pirate site was not live-streaming to 100 million users…

I know.

But given how much they spend on engineering, how much time they had and how important this event is ... mediocre performance.

All true, but this part of your GP comment:

> a company that fundamentally only does a single thing, which is this

… isn’t true. From the couch, watching Suits and watching a live sports match may seem similar but they’re very different technical problems to solve.

Or in other words: In one case the "stream" is stored on a harddrive not far away from you, only competing for bandwidth in the last section to you. In the other case the "stream" is comming over the Internet to you and everyone else at the same time.

I have to wonder if its a regional thing. I'm watching from the southern pacific in HD, and its been excellent.

I’d imagine it is fairly dependent on which cache you’re connected to.