Live Sports Streaming at Scale | CDN Infrastructure

Introduction

In the immensely complex world of live sports streaming, there are many points where hiccups can be encountered. In a newly published Sports Business Journal article, “Breaking new ground: The high-stakes challenges of live sports streaming at scale,” Netskrt’s VP of Product Strategy, Steve Miller-Jones laid out a framework for understanding how livestreamed events make their way from the field and onto people’s screens—and where they might get hung up along the way.

The Complexities of Live Streaming

In the article, Steve notes that the complexities of forecasting, production, encoding, packaging, and delivery demand not just precision but proactive overprovisioning and a relentless focus on accountability. Regarding delivery specifically—an area where Netskrt excels—Steve writes:

“There’s the matter of taking a livestream from the point of origin and transmitting it into households around the country, if not the globe. Here, the end-to-end complexity can be substantial, meaning that attention to detail throughout the solution and partner ecosystem being used is vital to ensuring success. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that strategies are in place to avoid content delivery challenges that occur when the path to a popular livestream gets congested.”

Questions Content Providers Should Ask

For content providers, Steve recommends posing the following questions to delivery teams and partners:

• How are we ensuring that all potential audience members can receive the stream, including those in remote areas and private networks?
• Can we verify and validate how we are reaching all types of subscriber networks, whatever their size?
• Have we selected a set of delivery partners that can assure our latency and startup time targets across the entire audience?
• How are we providing redundancy in the delivery chain? Are potential failure points being minimized between the livestream point of origin and its consumers?
• What tactics are being deployed to help avoid ISP, IX, and other congestion points for a widely distributed subscriber base?”

Conclusion

Netskrt works with its content partners to address the above questions and ensures high-quality on-demand and live streaming video are available in the hardest-to-reach points on the internet.