What the 2024 "Summer of Sports" Teaches Us About the Future of Streaming
The summer of 2024 has presented sports programming that rivals any other year in history. Whether it’s the Copa America finals, Tour de France, NBA finals, two golf majors, ICC World T20, Wimbledon, U.S. Open, an array of F1 Grand Prix’s, or the recently finished Paris Olympics and Paralympics – if you like sports, June to August has been a real treat! And so far, I’ve managed to list these events without mentioning the recent UEFA European Football Championship, which concluded in July and had an estimated global cumulative audience of 5 billion viewers. In short, live sports appeal immensely to audiences worldwide, particularly in a year like this.
In previous eras, mass sporting events such as soccer leagues and the roughly 3 billion Olympics viewers depended on satellite and terrestrial TV-centric broadcast distribution. Today, however, Internet and IP have almost taken over, not just for content contribution but increasingly as the last mile to the viewer. This shift is largely due to the rise of streaming. According to data from Nielsen, a media analyst firm, around 40% of total TV consumption is streamed, compared to 50% of satellite and terrestrial TV. Streaming offers convenience such as smart mobile device compatibility, the potential for 1080p and even 4K content, as well as pause and rewind functionalities that are not always available with legacy cable-satellite and TV alternatives.
Latency and Capacity Issues
IP-based delivery for content has shown almost linear growth across all markets, but there are some notable downsides. Take this example of the recent UEFA European Football Championship. For the quarter-final match of England vs. Switzerland, for which the sole UK broadcaster was the BBC, a staggering 26 million people tuned in to watch the game - over 60% of the UK adult population. What is more striking is that approximately 9 million viewers watched the coverage via the BBC iPlayer streaming service, which offered a feed that lagged behind the live TV broadcast by roughly 40 seconds. This latency issue is being addressed with more edge-based content delivery, but it is still a major challenge for IP to completely supplant terrestrial broadcast.
The other issue is capacity. According to the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, which studies FCC data, as of December 2022, the mean download speed for all residential fixed broadband subscriptions was 439 Mbps, while the median residential download speed was 300 Mbps. Nearly 79% of all residential subscriptions had a download speed of at least 100 Mbps. Even with the 100 Mbps threshold, streaming media over IP – unlike cable, satellite, or terrestrial TV – is delivered on a per-viewer stream rather than as a one-to-many broadcast.
Consider the 2024 Super Bowl, which generated a record-breaking 120 million viewers (largely in North America), of which approximately 8 million watched the streamed game. Streaming 8 million streams at 1080P at a conservative 5Mbps pushes an additional 40Tbps on the US internet load. If all 120 million viewers streamed a future Super Bowl exclusively in 4K at 15Mbps, the load would surge to 1800 Tbps - the equivalent of 1.5x the internet’s international bandwidth capacity.
Although a purely hypothetical scenario, there is simply not enough network capacity between the over 3,000 ISPs in the US to deliver an entirely streamed Super Bowl. Yet, it highlights the inherent challenge and why content delivery networks (CDNs) have become critical to the success of large-scale live sports.
Smarter Content Delivery
In its annual Live Streaming Survey of over 250 streaming providers across the US and Europe, Qwilt asked respondents several questions about “planning and executing a mass live-streamed event.” Unsurprisingly, CDN performance was the “greatest technical concern” for around a third of respondents. The importance of CDNs for content delivery remains essential; they move content to a distribution point closer to the viewer. However, there is a glaring weakness in the architecture and operational practices of today’s traditional CDNs, as they often flood ISPs' access networks with millions of redundant individual streams during mass live events. With deeply embedded, in-ISP caches, Open Caching solves this problem, offloading almost all the redundant live streams from exchange points and the ISP core network.
Many existing functions - such as pause and rewind - are just the tip of the potential iceberg when content delivery becomes more dynamic and smarter. For example, future innovations such as live feeds from helmet-cams, augmented reality, and ultra-high resolutions like 8K or 360-degree video are moving from the drawing board to a possibility. There are also some inherent challenges that CDNs mitigate, like upgrading ISP networks and devices to support the more efficient multi-cast model of content distribution. On the plus side, openness and interoperability through specifications such as Open Caching, as promoted by the Streaming Video Technology Alliance, are helping to make it easier to federate in-ISP cache systems to work more seamlessly within a unified delivery model.
Streaming Quality Matters
Historically, sports rights broadcasting has been acquired by a single broadcaster, ensuring exclusivity. Major sports franchises are increasingly making rights available to multiple publishers today and into the future. Take the UEFA Champions League, Europe’s most lucrative tournament, which increased revenues from €569 million across 14 rights holders in 2003 to €3.2 billion across 70 rights holders in the 2023/24 season. Today, in the larger European nations, there are at least three competing rights holders and, in some cases, at least two streaming options. In the US, the National Football League, the world’s most valuable ‘per game’ sports league, has five rights holders, including Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, FOX, and NBC. Although somewhat segregated to avoid direct competition, each has streaming services as an option alongside traditional broadcast delivery.
In this increasingly likely scenario of rival streaming services offering the same game, streaming quality of experience across buffering delays, image quality, and latency will become more critical. The choice of CDN provider and underlying technology will shift to become a major factor in attracting and retaining viewers.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Qwilt. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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