A Hong Kong pilot explores how creator-led distribution could reshape livestreaming for global competitions
Updated
April 8, 2026 5:28 PM
A dance crew performs in sync on stage at World of Dance under spotlights. PHOTO: WORLD OF DANCE HONG KONG
On January 22, 2026, World of Dance Hong Kong became the first global event to pilot Mitico’s community-based livestreaming model. The idea is simple: rethink how live competitions are shared in a digital-first world.
Instead of relying on a single official broadcast, the event was produced as one centralised live feed. It was then distributed across multiple creators and influencers, each hosting the stream for their own audience.
This gave creators room to add their own commentary, adapt the language and bring in cultural context that suited their communities, while the production remained consistent behind the scenes.
“Dance is a universal language”, said David Gonzalez, President of World of Dance. “Our collaboration with Mitico to produce an international, creator-led livestream in Hong Kong allowed a regional competition to reach a global audience. With personalised commentary from hosts in different languages, we can begin to see how regional events may connect through global communities”. This approach points to a shift away from traditional broadcaster-led distribution and toward creator-led amplification.
.jpg)
Mitico’s approach begins with a familiar industry challenge: the high cost of production and licensing, which often makes it difficult to livestream cultural and sports events at scale.
“Many cultural and sports competitions are never livestreamed because traditional broadcasting is too costly and complex”, said Chengcheng Li, Founder of Mitico. “By distributing a centralised production feed through creators and community hosts, regional events can reach global audiences while maintaining a unified production workflow”.
World of Dance (WOD) offered a natural test environment. It started as a global dance competition platform before entering a television partnership with NBC, which later produced four seasons of the World of Dance reality series. While the television programme concluded in 2021, the competition business has continued to expand through an international network of partners. Today, World of Dance competitions are represented in more than 72 countries, producing nearly 100 events each year, with a digital audience of more than 34 million followers across platforms
Despite that scale, many competitions are not livestreamed due to the high production costs and technical demands associated with traditional broadcasting. The Hong Kong event was selected to assess whether a community-led distribution model could offer a more scalable alternative for live coverage.
While no changes to World of Dance’s broader distribution strategy have been announced, the Hong Kong pilot offers an early indication of how global competitions may rethink livestreaming in an increasingly creator-driven media environment.
Keep Reading
The quiet infrastructure shift powering the next generation of data centers
Updated
February 12, 2026 1:21 PM
Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) port on a motherboard, coloured yellow. PHOTO: UNSPLASH
Modern data centers operate on a simple yet fundamental principle: computers require the ability to share data extremely quickly. As AI and cloud systems grow, servers are no longer confined to a single rack. They are spread across many racks, sometimes across entire rooms. When that happens, moving data quickly and cleanly becomes harder.
Montage Technology, a Shanghai-based semiconductor company, builds the chips and connection systems that help servers exchange data without delays. This week, the company announced a new Active Electrical Cable (AEC) solution based on PCIe 6.x and CXL 3.x — two important standards used to connect CPUs, GPUs, network cards and storage inside modern data centers.
In simple terms, Montage’s new AEC product helps different parts of a data center “talk” to each other faster and more reliably, even when those parts are physically far apart.
As data centers grow to support AI and cloud workloads, their architecture is changing. Instead of everything sitting inside one rack, systems now stretch across multiple racks and even multiple rows. This creates a new problem: the longer the distance between machines, the harder it is to keep data signals clean and fast.
This is where Active Electrical Cables come in. Unlike regular copper cables, AECs include small electronic components inside the cable itself. These components strengthen and clean up the data signal as it travels, so information can move farther without getting distorted or delayed.
Montage’s solution uses its own retimer chip based on PCIe 6.x and CXL 3.x. A “retimer” refreshes the data signal so it arrives accurately at the other end. This allows servers, GPUs, storage devices and network cards to stay tightly connected even across longer distances inside large data centers.
The company also uses high-density cable designs and built-in monitoring tools so operators can track performance and fix issues faster. That makes large data centers easier to deploy and maintain.
According to Montage, the solution has already passed interoperability tests with CPUs, xPUs, PCIe switches and network cards. It has also been jointly developed with cable manufacturers in China and validated at the system level.
What makes this development important is not just speed. It is about scale. AI models, cloud services and real-time applications demand massive amounts of data to move continuously between machines. If that movement slows down, everything else slows with it.
By improving how machines connect across racks, Montage’s AEC solution supports the kind of infrastructure that next-generation AI and cloud systems depend on.
Looking ahead, the company plans to expand its high-speed interconnect products further, including work on PCIe 7.0 and Ethernet retimer technologies.
Quietly, in the background of every AI system and cloud service, there is a network of cables and chips doing the hard work of moving data. Montage’s latest launch focuses on making that hidden layer faster, cleaner and ready for the scale that modern computing now demands.