Sneak Preview: Beat the Clock - How to Deliver Five-Nines Sports Streams at Scale
On Tuesday, February 25, Jason Thibeault of Streaming Video Technology Alliance will moderate the Streaming Media Connect panel "Beat the Clock: How to Deliver Five-Nines Sports Streams at Scale."
When large-scale sports streams fail to meet expectations, folks can't stop talking about it. Any sports streaming workflow is only as strong as its weakest (or least-tested) link. The more lucrative the license and massive the stream, unfortunately, the larger the opportunity and the smaller the margin for error. So, what do the experts say about the architectural demands and challenges of maintaining five-nines uptime and broadcast quality when the stakes are too high to let either suffer? And what solutions do they recommend?
Confirmed panelists include:
- Will Law, Chief Architect, Akamai Technologies
- Sean McCarthy, Director of Product Management - Video Platform, YouTube
- Tom Buffolano, Head of Business Development, The Switch
- Christy Tanner, Chair, Swerve TV
- Olga Kornienko, COO & Co-Founder, EZDRM
Jason Thibeault is the CEO of the Streaming Video Technology Alliance. The SVTA has several working groups that directly deal with CDN technologies, like Open Caching, or address CDN-related topics such as scalability (Networking & Transport), performance measurement (Measurement/QoE), and latency (Low Latency Streaming).
When the SVTA launched its Sports Streaming Council in 2024, Thibeault said, “Live sports streaming has some very unique technical challenges to ensure a high-quality viewer experience. We want to capture those so that our working groups, and other organizations, can address solutions which will improve the viewing experience for streaming sports regardless of platform."
Will Law is Chief Architect within the Cloud Technology Group at Akamai and a leading media delivery technologist, involved with streaming media on the Internet for the last twenty years. Currently focusing on Media Over QUIC, WebTransport, low latency streaming, MPEG DASH, CMCD, CMSD and CAT, Law is Co-Chair of the W3C WebTransport Working Group and the CTA Common Media Client Data Working Group and past President of the DASH Industry Forum and Chairman of the CTA WAVE Project. He holds Masters degrees in Aerospace Engineering and an MBA and prior to Akamai worked for a series of engineering and media-related startups.
"Five nines of reliability should not be our target. It’s not high enough for critical, single path components in a delivery system," Law says. "Robust delivery systems need higher levels of reliability, which can only practically be achieved through redundant combinations of less reliable components. The science of redundancy, rapid failure detection and failover along with monitoring, are critical to the successful operation of highly scalable systems. Additionally, capacity must be carefully mapped and planned so that loads are dynamically and appropriately apportioned to networks, avoiding link congestion. The majority of the effort involved in distributing a live sporting event occurs in the preparation, not in the execution.”
Sean McCarthy is Head of OTT-Broadcast Engineering at YouTube. Prior to joining YouTube, Sean spent time at Paramount, Bitmovin, and Akamai.
McCarthy contends that the keys to delivering great live events streams at scale in sports or any other area are CDN performance and collecting and analyzing real-time data. "In most companies, not enough weight is put on CDN and delivery and people are very over-focused on encoding settings--especially when it relates to live--because if you can't deliver the bits, it doesn't matter how good they look. There's a lot of interesting deep data in the CDN logs that three or four years ago was not feasible to collect today. You can collect it, you can analyze them. There are tools that are built for high-volume, high cardinality data, and over the next couple years, companies will start weighting that those data sources more heavily."
Tom Buffolano is Head of Business Development, College Sports at The Switch. A seasoned expert in the sports broadcasting and entertainment industry, his experience spans business development and partnerships, sales and marketing, rights acquisition, programming and production, distribution, and monetization. Tom holds decades of experience growing businesses and driving new partnerships at leading media companies, including MTV Networks, CBS College Sports, LTN Global Communications, BitFire Network/Studios and LiveU. Tom co-founded and was Chairman of the SVG College Sports Summit and College Sports Media Awards. Beyond his professional achievements, Tom serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the National Blood Clot Alliance.
He points to the agility and lower CapEx of FAST platforms as an entering wedge for bringing new, niche providers into the live sports streaming market with "customized live and related programs for fans of a particular team, league or sport [that] appeal to the right viewers – building a dedicated and highly targeted fanbase," Buffolano told Sport Broadcast last July. "Another significant benefit of FAST lies in its rapid deployment and ability to enable quick adjustments. Unlike traditional broadcasting systems, which demand substantial investment in equipment and infrastructure, FAST platforms can be quickly and economically deployed using the the cloud."
Christy Tanner is known internationally as an expert on how streaming, technology and AI are radically reshaping culture. As a leader, she transforms the world’s most recognizable brands and startups into profitable multiplatform competitors. She has created visionary growth opportunities for Swerve Sports, BBC, Univision, PBS, Altice, and Outside. As a CBS Interactive executive, she launched game-changing new streaming services that established market dominance and created exponential revenue growth for the CBS News, Sports and Local divisions. She is a Board Director of Audacy, has received the Technology Leadership Award from Broadcasting & Cable, and is a UN Generation Equality Leader.
As Tanner told an audience at last year's NAB Streaming Summit during a panel on The Complex Business of Live Sports Streaming, "To the extent that we can start to see some more experimentation with live sports and get some more data on it, we can really improve the experience and also the business model."
Olga Kornienko is the COO and Co-Founder of EZDRM, the DRM as a Service specialist. Since 2001, Olga has driven the growth of this very international enterprise and established it's strong market branding as both a business and a technology leader. Olga is an expert on video security, security industry history, and a frequent contributor to industry publications and conferences.
Kornienko says that when it comes to live streaming at scale, the key to achieving five-nines uptime is going multi-cloud. “We are in multiple clouds. That allows our customers to actually have a higher Service Level Agreement (SLA) than just an uptime guarantee [of] four nines. Because if you're in only one cloud … if they have a guarantee of four nines, we can't give you more than that. But once you expand to multiple clouds, you can go to five nines and that is a much more comfortable place to be.”
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