Red Bull Stratos: a live-streamed space jump — 8M concurrent viewers, a YouTube record

Red Bull Stratos was a project to have Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner jump from the edge of space, planned publicly since 2010 and executed on 14 October 2012. Baumgartner ascended by helium balloon to roughly 128,000 ft (39 km) above New Mexico, then stepped out and fell back to Earth, becoming the first human to break the sound barrier in freefall without a vehicle. Initial telemetry put his top speed at 833.9 mph (Mach 1.24); the mission's final data release revised it to 843.6 mph (Mach 1.25).

Rather than buying television slots, Red Bull Media House made the mission itself the media product. The ascent and jump were streamed live on Red Bull's YouTube channel, with the brand integrated into every frame of the broadcast. YouTube later confirmed the stream drew more than eight million simultaneous viewers — the most concurrent views of any live stream in YouTube's history at that point, and roughly sixteen times the traffic of NBC's 2012 Olympics live coverage, which had previously held the record.

Beyond the audience records, the mission was framed and run as science as well as spectacle: the team included medical director Jonathan Clark, collected more than 100 million data points during the flight, and developed protocols and equipment (including a treatment for ebullism and a new parachute deployment system) that the team said could inform future high-altitude and space operations. Baumgartner landed safely in the New Mexico desert minutes after jumping.

The campaign is widely read as a landmark in brand content: an energy drink company staging, producing and distributing a global live event whose draw was the feat itself, with the product's logo physically present at the edge of space.