NaviSite Scores with Wimbledon

NaviSite, selected as official streaming provider for Wimbledon Championships, said on Friday, that it served about 750,000 total streams during the tournament.

NaviSite was chosen to be the streaming provider for Wimbledon, streaming matches of the finals as well as highlight videos. But the live matches weren't shown in full motion, just as a slide show (roughly 1 frame every five seconds). According to Christopher Levy, senior director of technology for NaviSite's Streaming Media Group, this was done so the streams wouldn’t compete with the TV feeds.

"It's not the Olympics, which wouldn't stream live, and it's not the All-Star Game, which gave [full streaming] outright," Levy said. He called the stream a "high quality slide show."

Technically, Levy said that streaming the two-week event was a straightforward process. London-based TWI Interactive handled the encoding and production, while NaviSite grabbed the feeds from the production truck. It simply throttled down to the lower frames per second when sending out the streams. The audio went out intact, however. "Actually it wasn't too bad," said Levy. "The general comments we heard were good [but] we all wish it was full video." NaviSite distributed the content to its partner CDNs, managed the traffic with its StreamOS product and oversaw the entire event.

During the men's final match last Monday, NaviSite reported more than 16,000 simultaneous streams. The reason for the large online audience was because the match took place on Monday, allowing many people to tune in from work.

Levy said NaviSite was happy with the audience numbers. "[750,000 is] pretty healthy," said Levy. "Tennis is appealing, but not as widely appealing as a rock concert or a fashion show. We're very pleased with the traffic."

Next up for NaviSite will be the British Open, taking place next week.