Finally, the super popular Rap Việt season one officially wrapped up after the finale on November 14, with rapper Dế Choắt taking a surprising win.
Although the contest results sparked some debate online, we won’t get into that here. Instead, the spotlight turns to a moment just before the winner was announced, when host Trấn Thành revealed a surprising fact: Rap Việt set a world record for the highest number of live viewers on YouTube, hitting over 1 million viewers.
The moment Dế Choắt was crowned champion
This is definitely exciting news for Vietnam’s media scene, having a show reach a global record level. But there’s one catch… Rap Việt is not actually the YouTube live stream with the highest concurrent viewers in history.
The claimed world record number for Rap Việt
Vie Channel’s poster announcing record live viewers on YouTube
Who really holds the record?
Officially, the record for the highest concurrent viewers on a YouTube live stream belongs to Austrian astronaut Felix Baumgartner’s “Space Jump.”
On October 16, 2012, the world’s eyes were on the skies over New Mexico, USA, where Felix was about to take on a death-defying challenge: a jump from near space.
More precisely, he jumped from 39,000 meters, passing through the stratosphere at the edge of space. At that height, you can actually see the curvature of the Earth, so the public dubbed it the “space jump.”
Baumgartner freefell for 4 minutes and 20 seconds, reaching speeds up to 1342 km/h, breaking the sound barrier. This isn’t an exaggeration, it was officially recognized by the US National Aeronautics Association. At 1,500 meters, he deployed his parachute and safely landed in the desert east of New Mexico after a total of 9 minutes, without injury.
The entire “death-defying” jump was filmed and streamed live on YouTube, drawing 8 million concurrent viewers, an absolute record that remains unbeaten. A photo of Felix raising his victorious hand after landing quickly got over 200,000 likes, tens of thousands of comments, and nearly 30,000 shares on Facebook within 40 minutes.
Many videos have had more live viewers than Rap Việt
Even ignoring Felix’s space jump, many events worldwide have attracted far more YouTube live viewers than Rap Việt. At the end of 2019, Apple’s launch of the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max set a new record with over 2 million concurrent viewers.
In 2020, legendary singer Andrea Bocelli held an Easter live concert on YouTube that drew 2.8 million concurrent viewers within just 25 minutes.
So overall, Rap Việt’s 1 million viewers is far from a world record. Still, it shows just how huge the show’s impact was.
Just not a record breaker!
Sources: SpaceX, Tesla, NASA…
