The recent Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Championship 2024 turned out to be highly successful, with the final breaking records and helping YouTube Live reach a new viewership high. The two-legged showdown between Vietnam, the region's rising powerhouse, and Thailand, its most successful team, set an all-time high for peak concurrent viewership on the platform.
The football tournament, formerly known as the AFF Championship or AFF Cup, is one of the region's most-watched events. It features the nine highest-ranked national teams, along with the winner of a two-legged qualifier between the 10th and 11th-ranked sides. The competition follows a round-robin format, with each nation playing two home and two away matches.
The second leg of the summit clash between Vietnam and Thailand drew an astounding 19.6 million Peak Viewers (PV) on YouTube Live, setting a new platform record. This figure was 22.3% higher than the previous record, achieved in October 2024 during the League of Legends Worlds and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang's MPL Indonesia Season 14.
YouTube remains the only platform to surpass the 10 million PV milestone, with Twitch trailing far behind at 6.74 million peak concurrent viewers. Only three other livestreaming services — Rumble, Kick, and SOOP Korea — have managed to achieve overall record figures exceeding one million PV.
Vietnam’s 5:3 aggregate victory marked the end of Thailand’s dominant streak as two-time defending champions. This triumph also secured Vietnam its third title, placing the nation third in the all-time rankings for the most victories in the tournament’s history.
Unsurprisingly, the audience reach was led by channels from Vietnam, with the nation's two most famous football broadcasters ending as the most successful in terms of covering this biennial competition. FPT Bóng Đá Việt and BÓNG ĐÁ VIỆT NAM, both of which come under the FPT Corporation umbrella, finished as the two most popular channels over the past week across livestreaming services.
In fact, the top three spots on the peak concurrent viewership leaderboard were claimed by Vietnamese sports channels streaming the ASEAN Championship 2024, with another channel securing a spot in the top five. FPT Bóng Đá Việt and BÓNG ĐÁ VIỆT NAM also ranked among the ten most-watched channels across all platforms since the start of 2025.
In terms of event viewership as well, the ASEAN Championship 2024 hit numbers that easily put it atop the list of most successful tournaments to be livestreamed in the Sports segment. Its peak concurrent viewership figure more than doubled the next-best entry, the La Velada del Año IV, a boxing event hosted annually by ibai.
On a top ten table of the most popular livestreamed Sports tournaments, football and boxing share an impressive five entries each. Two of these events from the beautiful game have come from Asia, with the AFC Asian Cup 2024 hitting 2.21 million PV. The ASEAN Championship also finished as by far the most-watched event in the segment, reiterating the heady cocktail that Sports and livestreaming can be when the circumstances are right.
