When we saw that the opening keynote of the Streaming Media West conference, held this year in Santa Monica, California, would feature Netflix, we knew it would be worth attending. Faultline has been outspoken in analyzing Netflix’s large-scale live events, the most notable being the Tyson boxing match in November 2024, which gathered the largest-ever live streaming audience outside China, with 65 million concurrent sessions. Brett Axler, Head of Live Technical Launch Management at Netflix, gave a one-hour fireside chat, interviewed by Andy Beach, the conference chair. Axler leads Netflix’s live deployment team, which he described as an “air traffic control team” coordinating the various groups involved in live operations—core R&D, player, cloud, and CDN teams. These groups have long…