With over 3.75 million subscribers, Airrack, aka Eric Decker, is a 25 year old sensation on YouTube. In November 2021, Airrack made live streaming history by bringing together 12 of the biggest creators on YouTube to take part in an epic ping pong tournament.

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Millions of people were expected to tune in over the 3 hour live stream, but to make the event even more interesting and engaging, Airrack wanted the audience to feel more connected with the event. To make that happen, a list of ‘distractions’ was created to put the creators off their ping pong game. To decide which creator got which distraction, the audience was asked to vote.

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Trying to tally hundreds of thousands of comments manually would be an impossible job, but fortunately StreamAlive’s Wonder Words stepped up to the task. Viewers could quite literally impact the game-play and the outcome of the tournament. Over 365,000 comments rolled in over the course of the live stream, and StreamAlive parsed and tabulated tens of thousands of comments in seconds to allow the organizers to immediately know the winning distraction when voting was underway.

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The latency between thousands of comments and StreamAlive being able to tabulate them was less than a second thanks to the ultra-efficient algorithms and scalable architecture on the backend.

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The organizers could have used a second screen polling option to conduct the voting—but by keeping everything within YouTube and within the comments, a sense of urgency was created as fans jumped in to vote on the distractions. More importantly, eyeballs were kept firmly on the live stream.

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Watch the full video of the event below.