How to Plan for Live Streams at Scale
When it comes to scaling live streams for hundreds of thousands or millions of global viewers, planning is paramount, from meeting the demands of content distribution to monetization to optimizing viewer experiences. When delivering massive sports streams for Prime and NBCU and 24/7 news programming, AWS Global Leader, Solutions Architecture Steph Lone emphasizes registration systems, security, monitoring, redundancy, and failover, while adtech expert C.J. Leonard of Mad Leo Consulting highlights tactical elements like orchestration with content partners on tech and personnel and knowing the types of ads coming through in this discussion with Reality Software’s Nadine Krefetz at Streaming Media Connect 2024.
The five key areas for a properly prepared live stream event
Krefetz asks Lone, “When you're preparing for a live stream, what are the three things you think about that you really have to plan for?”
“I'm an overachiever, and so I picked five things!” Lone says. These five key areas are the stream's distribution, revenue components, security, complementary elements like paywalls and registration systems, and redundancy to ensure seamless delivery.
“Where does [the stream] need to be distributed to?” she says. “Because depending on the type of event, a lot of things could be happening to the revenue components. How is the customer monetizing this? For interactive ads: security, especially in big events for us at Amazon Securities, [it is] ‘job zero.’ So, thinking through things like DDoS attacks and then other complementary elements that require scaling. Some of our customers have paywalls or registrations. And [also], not forgetting about things like reg systems, billing systems, data collection mechanisms, and logging. And then the ability to deliver seamlessly to the consumer and failover when things fail, because things do fail during live events and [there needs to be] the ability to monitor that at every step of the way.”
Taking a tactical perspective with orchestration and reviewing ad campaigns
Krefetz says to Leonard, “I know that you're in a slightly different area. So when you talk about prepping and monetization, what are the three things that you think about?”
Leonard takes a more tactical perspective, highlighting the importance of orchestration, both in terms of technology and personnel and the need to review advertising campaigns. “If a FAST channel [is serving] live, how is everything firing with the SSAI vendor? I think, sometimes, when it doesn't fire correctly in VOD, or it doesn't fire correctly in the last channel in the EPG, no one's really paying attention. But when all eyes are on that event, orchestration with your cohorts in content to do a test stream [is essential].”
With advertising campaigns, she says, “Looking at the event, who’s coming in the door? So, whether it's a direct campaign that's trafficking your own ad server[…]or if it's a programmatic advertiser that maybe [is not] your big 10 pole event, you still want to review who's coming through the pipes.”
Join us in November 2024 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect.
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