2019: Our year in numbers

2019 was one of our most ambitious years yet here at eko. And while setting and hitting unrealistic goals has always been one of our core values, it seems we’ve really outdone ourselves this past year.

The following numbers genuinely represent who we are and what we do, and we’re very excited to be sharing them with you — so let’s jump right in!

In 2019, our viewers reached a record 5,715,544,027 seconds on the eko platform

That’s over 95,259,067 minutes, 1,587,651 hours, 66,152 days, 181 years, or 1,267 dog years!

We launched 21 new original shows with a total of 183 episodes

And these aren’t your average TV shows. We’re creating a new medium of interactive videos, which enable viewers to choose where the stories go and become active participants in what’s happening on-screen.

Unlike linear videos, which are comprised of a single continuous video file, interactive videos consist of multiple media files joined together seamlessly in real-time on the client. The trick is a delicate balancing act of bandwidth, by intelligently downloading the paths that the user is likely to watch using algorithms and heuristics given the user’s ever-changing bandwidth, as well as loading and unloading them from memory as they watch.

For example, the 4 original eko shows we launched in November have 598,627 storylines — that’s a lot of options for people to choose from…and they did!

Our viewers made 18,993,966 choices — creating 1,630,716,623 data events and 24,331,862,701 CDN requests

Have you ever tried inhaling and exhaling at the same time? How about downloading huge amounts of video while sending multiple data events every given second?

All this content was played on the eko player, which is the core of our technology. The player joins dynamic video and audio streams in real-time on smartphones, desktops, game consoles and smart TVs. It’s entirely written in JavaScript(!). Bet you didn’t think JS can do that, did you? You didn’t.

We encoded 1,123,633 interactive videos

Not all media devices are born equal. Some can be quite picky about the type of codec and media they feel like playing. That’s why we encode every piece of video to a multitude of formats, codecs and bitrates for optimal playback. We now have more than 17 variations of these and counting!

We added 756,748 lines of code, but also removed 503,885 of them

We simply asked ourselves which lines of code didn’t spark joy, and then chucked them out (but not without thanking them first…)

We’re a very committed team, with 4,839 commits during 2019. It’s not about the number of commits though, it’s what you do with them!

We served 4.2 petabytes of content

To store this amount of data with 2019 MacBook Pros (each equipped with a 256GB HD) you’d need to get 16,407 laptops. That’s 65,628 USB type-C ports and 0 USB type-A ports.

17,286 projects were published by creators in eko studio

We’re not the only ones who worked hard this year. Independent creators used our eko Studio web application to build thousands of interactive projects and deploy them to the cloud.

What an unbelievable year!

We couldn’t have done it without our 21 developers (5 of whom joined this year!) who drank 2,317 Nespresso capsules (from 13 different varieties), 746 shots of alcohol (Tequila, Vodka…you name it, after all — we’re all about choice… :P), but also 683 cups of tea, for those of us who are post the shot-phase of our lives.

47.619% is the number to reach in 2020

47.619% is our growth aspiration for eko.engineering next year, or in other words, 10 additional new team members. And why is that? We plan to launch our new and improved eko studio 2, so that every person in the world can create their own interactive video, with more flexibility to edit and compose interactive storytelling, and add custom code, custom UI and third party integrations. For these and many other new shows and unique projects (including a very cool commercial that you’ll probably hear about real soon) we will need to write a lot of code. The coffee, drinks and our brand new music room (including 4 new guitars) are waiting for us. We cannot wait.

Thanks for taking the time to read our 2019 summary.

Happy new year from the eko.engineering team! :)

Illustrations created by Creative Stall from The Noun Project