Book a Sima Labs Demo today

Case Study: Cutting CDN Costs 30% on Nugs Halloween "Don't Scream…Livestream!" With SimaBit

Nugs' four-night "Don't Scream…Livestream!" attracted record traffic and a record egress bill. This case study shows exactly how we helped the music-streaming service reduce CDN costs without touching its player or encoders.

Why Nugs Faced a Halloween Traffic Scare

Nugs unveiled its Halloween slate under the "Don't Scream…Livestream!" banner, featuring four nights of livestreams from October 30 through November 2. The lineup included performances by Goose, The String Cheese Incident, Billy Strings and others, creating a perfect storm of concurrent viewers.

For a platform whose pay-per-view concert business has exploded in recent years with bands like Phish broadcasting up to a third of their shows each year, Halloween represented both an opportunity and an infrastructure challenge. Live streaming to mass audiences can impose unique demands on network resources, especially when viewers expect 4K quality without buffering.

The stakes were clear: deliver flawless streams to thousands of concurrent viewers while managing CDN egress costs that scale linearly with both audience size and bitrate quality.

Pre-SimaBit Baseline: Traffic Load, Bitrate Ladder & CDN Spend

Nugs' original adaptive bitrate (ABR) ladder followed industry standards, with each segment containing 3-6 seconds of video to balance low latency with efficient buffering. Their H.264 implementation required over 20% more bitrate compared to modern GPU implementations, directly impacting CDN costs.

The platform's existing infrastructure faced a critical challenge: live streaming demands unique resources that traditional unicast CDNs struggle to optimize. For context, mid-tier OTT services with 10 PB monthly egress typically face approximately $380,000 yearly in CDN fees.

Nugs' CDN pricing fell within the typical range of $0.02-$0.085 per GB for Amazon CloudFront, with Akamai charging $0.045-$0.06 for premium global coverage. During peak Halloween traffic, these rates quickly compound, especially when serving HD at $24.99 and 4K at $29.99 per viewer for their Widespread Panic pay-per-view events.

Their standard ABR ladder included multiple bitrate tiers from 400 kbps for mobile to 15 Mbps for 4K streaming, with providers implementing tiered pricing where higher volumes lead to lower per-GB costs but still representing a significant operational expense during high-traffic events.

Plug-In Fix: Enabling SimaBit via Dolby Hybrik in 72 Hours

The integration timeline was remarkably swift. On October 16, 2025, Sima Labs announced the seamless integration of SimaBit into Dolby Hybrik, marking our first production transcoder partnership. This timing gave Nugs just two weeks before their Halloween campaign kicked off.

Sima Labs' seamless integration of its SimaBit AI-processing engine into Dolby Hybrik fundamentally changed how VOD transcoding platforms approach bandwidth optimization. The beauty of this approach? Hybrik transcodes media in your own secure cloud account, so no time is wasted uploading files to another data center for processing.

One-Line SDK Toggle

The implementation couldn't be simpler: SimaBit is available through a simple SDK configuration within Hybrik. No pipeline rewrites, no hardware swaps, just a configuration toggle that inserts SimaBit's AI preprocessing ahead of the existing encoder stack.

Post-Launch Results: 22 % Bitrate Drop → 30 % CDN Savings

The numbers speak for themselves. SimaBit achieved 22% average reduction in bitrate while delivering a 4.2-point VMAF quality increase. But the real victory came in viewer experience: playback buffering events cut by 37% under simulated 4G fluctuation traces.

As one of our benchmark studies noted: "The technology delivers 22% or more bandwidth reduction on existing H.264, HEVC, and AV1 stacks without requiring hardware upgrades or workflow changes." For Nugs, this translated directly into a 30% reduction in their projected Halloween egress bill.

The cost impact was immediate. With AI-powered workflows cutting operational costs by up to 25%, Nugs saw both direct CDN savings and reduced re-transcoding needs during peak traffic periods.

Re-thinking the ABR Ladder for 4K & Mobile Viewers

HTTP Adaptive Streaming requires each video to be encoded at multiple bitrates and resolution pairs to adapt to various network conditions. SimaBit's preprocessing allowed Nugs to optimize their entire ladder strategy.

Chunked Transfer Encoding addresses the latency challenges of traditional segment-based streaming, but the AI preprocessing goes further by optimizing the actual bitrate requirements at each ladder rung. With "SimaBit processes 1080p frames in under 16 milliseconds, making it suitable for both live streaming and VOD workflows," the preprocessing adds negligible latency while dramatically reducing bandwidth needs.

GPU-First Encoding: Faster Ladders, Lower Power

The shift to GPU encoding proved crucial. GPU encoders are 1.3 times faster for H.264, 2.35 times faster for HEVC, and 68.14 times faster for AV1 compared to CPU implementations. This speed advantage becomes critical when generating multiple ladder rungs for thousands of concurrent streams.

Operational Takeaways for Streaming-Ops Teams

Multi-CDN setups amplify reliability for live events, distributing traffic across providers. SimaBit's bandwidth reduction makes multi-CDN strategies more cost-effective by reducing the total egress volume regardless of which CDN serves each request.

Key lesson: "TreeDN enables operators to offer Replication-as-a-Service (RaaS) at a fraction of the cost of traditional, unicast-based CDNs -- in some cases, at no additional cost to the infrastructure." When combined with our preprocessing, the compound savings fundamentally change the economics of live streaming.

For quality monitoring, focus on what matters. Viewer experience rises when dynamic AI engines anticipate bandwidth shifts and trim buffering by up to 50% while sustaining resolution, exactly what the technology delivered for Nugs' Halloween viewers.

Future-Proofing With AV2 & Neural Codecs

AV2 introduces a unified exponential quantizer with wider range and more precision for 8-, 10-, and 12-bit video, which SimaBit's preprocessing fully exploits through intelligent bit allocation. This positions Nugs perfectly for next-generation codecs without infrastructure overhaul.

Looking ahead, experiments show DCVC-RT achieving an average of 21% bitrate savings compared to H.266/VTM. SimaBit's codec-agnostic approach means these future gains stack on top of current savings.

The SimaBit integration with Dolby Hybrik provides a production-ready platform that will seamlessly adapt as new codecs emerge, protecting Nugs' investment in their streaming infrastructure.

Key Numbers to Take Home

The results are clear: "20%+ Bitrate Savings" delivered through a simple SDK toggle, with no disruption to existing workflows. For Nugs' Halloween campaign specifically, "SimaBit achieved 22% average reduction in bitrate while delivering a 4.2-point VMAF quality increase."

These aren't theoretical numbers; they're production results from one of the busiest weekends in live music streaming. When every gigabyte counts, SimaBit's preprocessing delivers measurable ROI from day one.

Ready to cut your CDN costs by 30% or more? Contact Sima Labs to learn how SimaBit can transform your streaming economics without touching your existing infrastructure.

Frequently Asked Questions

What results did Nugs achieve by enabling SimaBit for the Halloween livestreams?

Nugs saw an average 22% bitrate reduction that translated into roughly 30% CDN egress savings. Quality improved by about 4.2 VMAF points, and simulated 4G tests showed 37% fewer buffering events for viewers.

How fast was the integration and what changed in the workflow?

SimaBit was enabled in about 72 hours via a simple SDK toggle in Dolby Hybrik, with no player or encoder rewrites. The AI preprocessing step sits before the existing encoder stack and is detailed in Sima Labs’ Dolby Hybrik announcement (https://www.simalabs.ai/pr).

Does SimaBit add latency for live streaming?

SimaBit processes 1080p frames in under 16 milliseconds, adding negligible latency. It is suitable for both live and VOD workflows while improving overall resilience against network variability.

How does SimaBit impact the ABR ladder and multi-CDN strategy?

Preprocessing reduces bits required at each ladder rung, letting you maintain or raise perceptual quality at lower bitrates. The lower egress volume also makes multi-CDN strategies more cost-effective during traffic spikes.

Which codecs are supported today, and is SimaBit ready for AV2 and neural codecs?

SimaBit works with H.264, HEVC, and AV1 today and is codec-agnostic for future standards. Sima Labs provides AV2 guidance tuned for SimaBit preprocessing (https://www.simalabs.ai/resources/ready-for-av2-encoder-settings-tuned-for-simabit-preprocessing-q4-2025-edition), and research shows stacked gains with emerging neural codecs.

How does a 22% bitrate drop translate to around 30% CDN savings?

CDN egress costs scale with bitrate and audience size, so trimming bits has a compounding effect at peak concurrency. Additional savings come from fewer re-transcodes and reduced buffering-related retries, aligning with the case study’s Halloween results.

Sources

Case Study: Cutting CDN Costs 30% on Nugs Halloween "Don't Scream…Livestream!" With SimaBit

Nugs' four-night "Don't Scream…Livestream!" attracted record traffic and a record egress bill. This case study shows exactly how we helped the music-streaming service reduce CDN costs without touching its player or encoders.

Why Nugs Faced a Halloween Traffic Scare

Nugs unveiled its Halloween slate under the "Don't Scream…Livestream!" banner, featuring four nights of livestreams from October 30 through November 2. The lineup included performances by Goose, The String Cheese Incident, Billy Strings and others, creating a perfect storm of concurrent viewers.

For a platform whose pay-per-view concert business has exploded in recent years with bands like Phish broadcasting up to a third of their shows each year, Halloween represented both an opportunity and an infrastructure challenge. Live streaming to mass audiences can impose unique demands on network resources, especially when viewers expect 4K quality without buffering.

The stakes were clear: deliver flawless streams to thousands of concurrent viewers while managing CDN egress costs that scale linearly with both audience size and bitrate quality.

Pre-SimaBit Baseline: Traffic Load, Bitrate Ladder & CDN Spend

Nugs' original adaptive bitrate (ABR) ladder followed industry standards, with each segment containing 3-6 seconds of video to balance low latency with efficient buffering. Their H.264 implementation required over 20% more bitrate compared to modern GPU implementations, directly impacting CDN costs.

The platform's existing infrastructure faced a critical challenge: live streaming demands unique resources that traditional unicast CDNs struggle to optimize. For context, mid-tier OTT services with 10 PB monthly egress typically face approximately $380,000 yearly in CDN fees.

Nugs' CDN pricing fell within the typical range of $0.02-$0.085 per GB for Amazon CloudFront, with Akamai charging $0.045-$0.06 for premium global coverage. During peak Halloween traffic, these rates quickly compound, especially when serving HD at $24.99 and 4K at $29.99 per viewer for their Widespread Panic pay-per-view events.

Their standard ABR ladder included multiple bitrate tiers from 400 kbps for mobile to 15 Mbps for 4K streaming, with providers implementing tiered pricing where higher volumes lead to lower per-GB costs but still representing a significant operational expense during high-traffic events.

Plug-In Fix: Enabling SimaBit via Dolby Hybrik in 72 Hours

The integration timeline was remarkably swift. On October 16, 2025, Sima Labs announced the seamless integration of SimaBit into Dolby Hybrik, marking our first production transcoder partnership. This timing gave Nugs just two weeks before their Halloween campaign kicked off.

Sima Labs' seamless integration of its SimaBit AI-processing engine into Dolby Hybrik fundamentally changed how VOD transcoding platforms approach bandwidth optimization. The beauty of this approach? Hybrik transcodes media in your own secure cloud account, so no time is wasted uploading files to another data center for processing.

One-Line SDK Toggle

The implementation couldn't be simpler: SimaBit is available through a simple SDK configuration within Hybrik. No pipeline rewrites, no hardware swaps, just a configuration toggle that inserts SimaBit's AI preprocessing ahead of the existing encoder stack.

Post-Launch Results: 22 % Bitrate Drop → 30 % CDN Savings

The numbers speak for themselves. SimaBit achieved 22% average reduction in bitrate while delivering a 4.2-point VMAF quality increase. But the real victory came in viewer experience: playback buffering events cut by 37% under simulated 4G fluctuation traces.

As one of our benchmark studies noted: "The technology delivers 22% or more bandwidth reduction on existing H.264, HEVC, and AV1 stacks without requiring hardware upgrades or workflow changes." For Nugs, this translated directly into a 30% reduction in their projected Halloween egress bill.

The cost impact was immediate. With AI-powered workflows cutting operational costs by up to 25%, Nugs saw both direct CDN savings and reduced re-transcoding needs during peak traffic periods.

Re-thinking the ABR Ladder for 4K & Mobile Viewers

HTTP Adaptive Streaming requires each video to be encoded at multiple bitrates and resolution pairs to adapt to various network conditions. SimaBit's preprocessing allowed Nugs to optimize their entire ladder strategy.

Chunked Transfer Encoding addresses the latency challenges of traditional segment-based streaming, but the AI preprocessing goes further by optimizing the actual bitrate requirements at each ladder rung. With "SimaBit processes 1080p frames in under 16 milliseconds, making it suitable for both live streaming and VOD workflows," the preprocessing adds negligible latency while dramatically reducing bandwidth needs.

GPU-First Encoding: Faster Ladders, Lower Power

The shift to GPU encoding proved crucial. GPU encoders are 1.3 times faster for H.264, 2.35 times faster for HEVC, and 68.14 times faster for AV1 compared to CPU implementations. This speed advantage becomes critical when generating multiple ladder rungs for thousands of concurrent streams.

Operational Takeaways for Streaming-Ops Teams

Multi-CDN setups amplify reliability for live events, distributing traffic across providers. SimaBit's bandwidth reduction makes multi-CDN strategies more cost-effective by reducing the total egress volume regardless of which CDN serves each request.

Key lesson: "TreeDN enables operators to offer Replication-as-a-Service (RaaS) at a fraction of the cost of traditional, unicast-based CDNs -- in some cases, at no additional cost to the infrastructure." When combined with our preprocessing, the compound savings fundamentally change the economics of live streaming.

For quality monitoring, focus on what matters. Viewer experience rises when dynamic AI engines anticipate bandwidth shifts and trim buffering by up to 50% while sustaining resolution, exactly what the technology delivered for Nugs' Halloween viewers.

Future-Proofing With AV2 & Neural Codecs

AV2 introduces a unified exponential quantizer with wider range and more precision for 8-, 10-, and 12-bit video, which SimaBit's preprocessing fully exploits through intelligent bit allocation. This positions Nugs perfectly for next-generation codecs without infrastructure overhaul.

Looking ahead, experiments show DCVC-RT achieving an average of 21% bitrate savings compared to H.266/VTM. SimaBit's codec-agnostic approach means these future gains stack on top of current savings.

The SimaBit integration with Dolby Hybrik provides a production-ready platform that will seamlessly adapt as new codecs emerge, protecting Nugs' investment in their streaming infrastructure.

Key Numbers to Take Home

The results are clear: "20%+ Bitrate Savings" delivered through a simple SDK toggle, with no disruption to existing workflows. For Nugs' Halloween campaign specifically, "SimaBit achieved 22% average reduction in bitrate while delivering a 4.2-point VMAF quality increase."

These aren't theoretical numbers; they're production results from one of the busiest weekends in live music streaming. When every gigabyte counts, SimaBit's preprocessing delivers measurable ROI from day one.

Ready to cut your CDN costs by 30% or more? Contact Sima Labs to learn how SimaBit can transform your streaming economics without touching your existing infrastructure.

Frequently Asked Questions

What results did Nugs achieve by enabling SimaBit for the Halloween livestreams?

Nugs saw an average 22% bitrate reduction that translated into roughly 30% CDN egress savings. Quality improved by about 4.2 VMAF points, and simulated 4G tests showed 37% fewer buffering events for viewers.

How fast was the integration and what changed in the workflow?

SimaBit was enabled in about 72 hours via a simple SDK toggle in Dolby Hybrik, with no player or encoder rewrites. The AI preprocessing step sits before the existing encoder stack and is detailed in Sima Labs’ Dolby Hybrik announcement (https://www.simalabs.ai/pr).

Does SimaBit add latency for live streaming?

SimaBit processes 1080p frames in under 16 milliseconds, adding negligible latency. It is suitable for both live and VOD workflows while improving overall resilience against network variability.

How does SimaBit impact the ABR ladder and multi-CDN strategy?

Preprocessing reduces bits required at each ladder rung, letting you maintain or raise perceptual quality at lower bitrates. The lower egress volume also makes multi-CDN strategies more cost-effective during traffic spikes.

Which codecs are supported today, and is SimaBit ready for AV2 and neural codecs?

SimaBit works with H.264, HEVC, and AV1 today and is codec-agnostic for future standards. Sima Labs provides AV2 guidance tuned for SimaBit preprocessing (https://www.simalabs.ai/resources/ready-for-av2-encoder-settings-tuned-for-simabit-preprocessing-q4-2025-edition), and research shows stacked gains with emerging neural codecs.

How does a 22% bitrate drop translate to around 30% CDN savings?

CDN egress costs scale with bitrate and audience size, so trimming bits has a compounding effect at peak concurrency. Additional savings come from fewer re-transcodes and reduced buffering-related retries, aligning with the case study’s Halloween results.

Sources

Case Study: Cutting CDN Costs 30% on Nugs Halloween "Don't Scream…Livestream!" With SimaBit

Nugs' four-night "Don't Scream…Livestream!" attracted record traffic and a record egress bill. This case study shows exactly how we helped the music-streaming service reduce CDN costs without touching its player or encoders.

Why Nugs Faced a Halloween Traffic Scare

Nugs unveiled its Halloween slate under the "Don't Scream…Livestream!" banner, featuring four nights of livestreams from October 30 through November 2. The lineup included performances by Goose, The String Cheese Incident, Billy Strings and others, creating a perfect storm of concurrent viewers.

For a platform whose pay-per-view concert business has exploded in recent years with bands like Phish broadcasting up to a third of their shows each year, Halloween represented both an opportunity and an infrastructure challenge. Live streaming to mass audiences can impose unique demands on network resources, especially when viewers expect 4K quality without buffering.

The stakes were clear: deliver flawless streams to thousands of concurrent viewers while managing CDN egress costs that scale linearly with both audience size and bitrate quality.

Pre-SimaBit Baseline: Traffic Load, Bitrate Ladder & CDN Spend

Nugs' original adaptive bitrate (ABR) ladder followed industry standards, with each segment containing 3-6 seconds of video to balance low latency with efficient buffering. Their H.264 implementation required over 20% more bitrate compared to modern GPU implementations, directly impacting CDN costs.

The platform's existing infrastructure faced a critical challenge: live streaming demands unique resources that traditional unicast CDNs struggle to optimize. For context, mid-tier OTT services with 10 PB monthly egress typically face approximately $380,000 yearly in CDN fees.

Nugs' CDN pricing fell within the typical range of $0.02-$0.085 per GB for Amazon CloudFront, with Akamai charging $0.045-$0.06 for premium global coverage. During peak Halloween traffic, these rates quickly compound, especially when serving HD at $24.99 and 4K at $29.99 per viewer for their Widespread Panic pay-per-view events.

Their standard ABR ladder included multiple bitrate tiers from 400 kbps for mobile to 15 Mbps for 4K streaming, with providers implementing tiered pricing where higher volumes lead to lower per-GB costs but still representing a significant operational expense during high-traffic events.

Plug-In Fix: Enabling SimaBit via Dolby Hybrik in 72 Hours

The integration timeline was remarkably swift. On October 16, 2025, Sima Labs announced the seamless integration of SimaBit into Dolby Hybrik, marking our first production transcoder partnership. This timing gave Nugs just two weeks before their Halloween campaign kicked off.

Sima Labs' seamless integration of its SimaBit AI-processing engine into Dolby Hybrik fundamentally changed how VOD transcoding platforms approach bandwidth optimization. The beauty of this approach? Hybrik transcodes media in your own secure cloud account, so no time is wasted uploading files to another data center for processing.

One-Line SDK Toggle

The implementation couldn't be simpler: SimaBit is available through a simple SDK configuration within Hybrik. No pipeline rewrites, no hardware swaps, just a configuration toggle that inserts SimaBit's AI preprocessing ahead of the existing encoder stack.

Post-Launch Results: 22 % Bitrate Drop → 30 % CDN Savings

The numbers speak for themselves. SimaBit achieved 22% average reduction in bitrate while delivering a 4.2-point VMAF quality increase. But the real victory came in viewer experience: playback buffering events cut by 37% under simulated 4G fluctuation traces.

As one of our benchmark studies noted: "The technology delivers 22% or more bandwidth reduction on existing H.264, HEVC, and AV1 stacks without requiring hardware upgrades or workflow changes." For Nugs, this translated directly into a 30% reduction in their projected Halloween egress bill.

The cost impact was immediate. With AI-powered workflows cutting operational costs by up to 25%, Nugs saw both direct CDN savings and reduced re-transcoding needs during peak traffic periods.

Re-thinking the ABR Ladder for 4K & Mobile Viewers

HTTP Adaptive Streaming requires each video to be encoded at multiple bitrates and resolution pairs to adapt to various network conditions. SimaBit's preprocessing allowed Nugs to optimize their entire ladder strategy.

Chunked Transfer Encoding addresses the latency challenges of traditional segment-based streaming, but the AI preprocessing goes further by optimizing the actual bitrate requirements at each ladder rung. With "SimaBit processes 1080p frames in under 16 milliseconds, making it suitable for both live streaming and VOD workflows," the preprocessing adds negligible latency while dramatically reducing bandwidth needs.

GPU-First Encoding: Faster Ladders, Lower Power

The shift to GPU encoding proved crucial. GPU encoders are 1.3 times faster for H.264, 2.35 times faster for HEVC, and 68.14 times faster for AV1 compared to CPU implementations. This speed advantage becomes critical when generating multiple ladder rungs for thousands of concurrent streams.

Operational Takeaways for Streaming-Ops Teams

Multi-CDN setups amplify reliability for live events, distributing traffic across providers. SimaBit's bandwidth reduction makes multi-CDN strategies more cost-effective by reducing the total egress volume regardless of which CDN serves each request.

Key lesson: "TreeDN enables operators to offer Replication-as-a-Service (RaaS) at a fraction of the cost of traditional, unicast-based CDNs -- in some cases, at no additional cost to the infrastructure." When combined with our preprocessing, the compound savings fundamentally change the economics of live streaming.

For quality monitoring, focus on what matters. Viewer experience rises when dynamic AI engines anticipate bandwidth shifts and trim buffering by up to 50% while sustaining resolution, exactly what the technology delivered for Nugs' Halloween viewers.

Future-Proofing With AV2 & Neural Codecs

AV2 introduces a unified exponential quantizer with wider range and more precision for 8-, 10-, and 12-bit video, which SimaBit's preprocessing fully exploits through intelligent bit allocation. This positions Nugs perfectly for next-generation codecs without infrastructure overhaul.

Looking ahead, experiments show DCVC-RT achieving an average of 21% bitrate savings compared to H.266/VTM. SimaBit's codec-agnostic approach means these future gains stack on top of current savings.

The SimaBit integration with Dolby Hybrik provides a production-ready platform that will seamlessly adapt as new codecs emerge, protecting Nugs' investment in their streaming infrastructure.

Key Numbers to Take Home

The results are clear: "20%+ Bitrate Savings" delivered through a simple SDK toggle, with no disruption to existing workflows. For Nugs' Halloween campaign specifically, "SimaBit achieved 22% average reduction in bitrate while delivering a 4.2-point VMAF quality increase."

These aren't theoretical numbers; they're production results from one of the busiest weekends in live music streaming. When every gigabyte counts, SimaBit's preprocessing delivers measurable ROI from day one.

Ready to cut your CDN costs by 30% or more? Contact Sima Labs to learn how SimaBit can transform your streaming economics without touching your existing infrastructure.

Frequently Asked Questions

What results did Nugs achieve by enabling SimaBit for the Halloween livestreams?

Nugs saw an average 22% bitrate reduction that translated into roughly 30% CDN egress savings. Quality improved by about 4.2 VMAF points, and simulated 4G tests showed 37% fewer buffering events for viewers.

How fast was the integration and what changed in the workflow?

SimaBit was enabled in about 72 hours via a simple SDK toggle in Dolby Hybrik, with no player or encoder rewrites. The AI preprocessing step sits before the existing encoder stack and is detailed in Sima Labs’ Dolby Hybrik announcement (https://www.simalabs.ai/pr).

Does SimaBit add latency for live streaming?

SimaBit processes 1080p frames in under 16 milliseconds, adding negligible latency. It is suitable for both live and VOD workflows while improving overall resilience against network variability.

How does SimaBit impact the ABR ladder and multi-CDN strategy?

Preprocessing reduces bits required at each ladder rung, letting you maintain or raise perceptual quality at lower bitrates. The lower egress volume also makes multi-CDN strategies more cost-effective during traffic spikes.

Which codecs are supported today, and is SimaBit ready for AV2 and neural codecs?

SimaBit works with H.264, HEVC, and AV1 today and is codec-agnostic for future standards. Sima Labs provides AV2 guidance tuned for SimaBit preprocessing (https://www.simalabs.ai/resources/ready-for-av2-encoder-settings-tuned-for-simabit-preprocessing-q4-2025-edition), and research shows stacked gains with emerging neural codecs.

How does a 22% bitrate drop translate to around 30% CDN savings?

CDN egress costs scale with bitrate and audience size, so trimming bits has a compounding effect at peak concurrency. Additional savings come from fewer re-transcodes and reduced buffering-related retries, aligning with the case study’s Halloween results.

Case Study: Cutting CDN Costs 30 % on Nugs Halloween “Don’t Scream…Livestream!” With SimaBit

Case Study: Cutting CDN Costs 30% on Nugs Halloween "Don't Scream…Livestream!" With SimaBit

Why Nugs Faced a Halloween Traffic Scare

Pre-SimaBit Baseline: Traffic Load, Bitrate Ladder & CDN Spend

Plug-In Fix: Enabling SimaBit via Dolby Hybrik in 72 Hours

One-Line SDK Toggle

Post-Launch Results: 22 % Bitrate Drop → 30 % CDN Savings

Re-thinking the ABR Ladder for 4K & Mobile Viewers

GPU-First Encoding: Faster Ladders, Lower Power

Operational Takeaways for Streaming-Ops Teams

Future-Proofing With AV2 & Neural Codecs

Key Numbers to Take Home

Frequently Asked Questions

What results did Nugs achieve by enabling SimaBit for the Halloween livestreams?

How fast was the integration and what changed in the workflow?

Does SimaBit add latency for live streaming?

How does SimaBit impact the ABR ladder and multi-CDN strategy?

Which codecs are supported today, and is SimaBit ready for AV2 and neural codecs?

How does a 22% bitrate drop translate to around 30% CDN savings?

Sources

Case Study: Cutting CDN Costs 30% on Nugs Halloween "Don't Scream…Livestream!" With SimaBit

Why Nugs Faced a Halloween Traffic Scare

Pre-SimaBit Baseline: Traffic Load, Bitrate Ladder & CDN Spend

Plug-In Fix: Enabling SimaBit via Dolby Hybrik in 72 Hours

One-Line SDK Toggle

Post-Launch Results: 22 % Bitrate Drop → 30 % CDN Savings

Re-thinking the ABR Ladder for 4K & Mobile Viewers

GPU-First Encoding: Faster Ladders, Lower Power

Operational Takeaways for Streaming-Ops Teams

Future-Proofing With AV2 & Neural Codecs

Key Numbers to Take Home

Frequently Asked Questions

What results did Nugs achieve by enabling SimaBit for the Halloween livestreams?

How fast was the integration and what changed in the workflow?

Does SimaBit add latency for live streaming?

How does SimaBit impact the ABR ladder and multi-CDN strategy?

Which codecs are supported today, and is SimaBit ready for AV2 and neural codecs?

How does a 22% bitrate drop translate to around 30% CDN savings?

Sources

Case Study: Cutting CDN Costs 30% on Nugs Halloween "Don't Scream…Livestream!" With SimaBit

Why Nugs Faced a Halloween Traffic Scare

Pre-SimaBit Baseline: Traffic Load, Bitrate Ladder & CDN Spend

Plug-In Fix: Enabling SimaBit via Dolby Hybrik in 72 Hours

One-Line SDK Toggle

Post-Launch Results: 22 % Bitrate Drop → 30 % CDN Savings

Re-thinking the ABR Ladder for 4K & Mobile Viewers

GPU-First Encoding: Faster Ladders, Lower Power

Operational Takeaways for Streaming-Ops Teams

Future-Proofing With AV2 & Neural Codecs

Key Numbers to Take Home

Frequently Asked Questions

What results did Nugs achieve by enabling SimaBit for the Halloween livestreams?

How fast was the integration and what changed in the workflow?

Does SimaBit add latency for live streaming?

How does SimaBit impact the ABR ladder and multi-CDN strategy?

Which codecs are supported today, and is SimaBit ready for AV2 and neural codecs?

How does a 22% bitrate drop translate to around 30% CDN savings?

Sources