How to Deliver Global Sports Streams at Scale in a Fragmented Device Market
Delivering sports streams at scale even on a regional level means managing compatibility challenges in a fragmented device market where users are watching on a range of devices and platforms, but those challenges are magnified exponentially for global sports delivery when a morass of legacy devices come into play. How do you ensure optimal viewer experience to all of these devices, and is it even possible?
YouTube’s Sean McCarthy, Akamai’s Will Law, Swerve Sports’ Christy Tanner, EZDRM’s Olga Kornienko, and SVTA’s Jason Thibeault discuss these issues in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2025.
The issues of handling device diversity and fragmentation
Thibeault says, “We know that these events, when they go global, are going to markets where there are older devices.” He asks Kornienko, “When we talk about five nines of streaming sports at scale, delivering really great live sports experiences, how does device fragmentation complicate our ability to do that?”
Kornienko emphasizes that it is a complex and not easily solved problem. “Where do I even start?” she says. “At one point, we were trying to help out a client in Eastern Europe who was delivering televisions that were 10 to 12 years old, and this was a couple of years ago. We were trying to figure out how to deliver content to a television that was supporting the very first version of a Silverlight, which has never been updated since.”
She says that large, more region-specific events such as the Super Bowl, which is primarily watched in the US, can be easier to manage, because there is a clearer idea of what the device landscape looks like. But with other global events such as the Olympics and European FIFA, she says, “You might be delivering content to a whole zoo of devices. And I'm not the best person to tell you what kind of codec and file formats those devices support. But we need to test [a] specific device with this specific encryption, and see if it does work, because the license gets delivered, the content is there, but just nothing plays. If you're dealing with your own country and you have somewhat of a closed ecosystem, you know what you're looking at. But if you're doing world devices, what is your device ecosystem and what are you trying to hit? I think that is one of the scarier questions to answer, too.”
YouTube's approach to handling device diversity
McCarthy discusses some of the ways that YouTube handles device diversity and fragmentation.
“The way that we fundamentally have been thinking about it is porting a lot of the client side logic,” he says. “Everything from an AVR to multi-viewing experiences to the edge, really generating these either in our core compute or at the edge, wherever we can, rendering these sort of multi-view experiences or server-side AVR such that we can deliver the same experience across devices globally. And it works really well, but it provides a different type of challenge. It adds to the scale problem. On the server side, it does help with the development resources of not having to have massive development teams per client platform, but the server-side scaling aspect of it and being able to have those really rich experiences you can provide is now the challenge we're facing. Not to mention there's more bandwidth and more network requests going out now, so it exacerbates the scale challenge, but it is a way to offer a seamless user experience across these older legacy or esoteric devices.”
The economic considerations of device diversity
Will Law highlights how economic considerations are a factor in considering how to handle device diversity.
“Like it or not, it gets incrementally harder to address the edges of the device landscape,” he says. “LG and Samsung TVs that are older than 2018, you have to look at that's going to raise maybe by a third your engineering cost to support it. And is that fraction of your audience worth the revenue you're getting from supporting them? And I meet with many distributors facing exactly the same decision and they're like, ‘Yes, we make more money and it's worth it.’ But at some point they cross that line. It's not that they don't want to support the users, it becomes economically unsustainable for them to keep doing that. Platforms like HTML5-based playback give you a very flexible environment to reach a lot of players if you can ensure that your device supports it. So, you can counter the device diversity with common application frameworks like that.”
Putting the consumer at the center of decision-making
Tanner of Swerve Sports discusses placing the consumer at the center of decision-making.
“I always try to put the consumer at the center of our decision-making,” she says. “And I think that is a massive challenge for the streaming industry in general, not just sports, but for news and entertainment. When you're setting up a testing environment, you cannot possibly test for all the different interfaces that consumers are facing. Authentication looks different for every provider. I think the important thing is to put the consumer at the center because ultimately, that will drive your business. We do have to sometimes make decisions to not support older devices and smaller subsets of users, but that benefits the greater pool of users.”
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