Content may be king, but when it comes to live-streaming a sports event, that king requires plenty of support to get it where it needs to go. Live streaming takes plenty of planning, and choosing the right content-delivery network (CDN) must be an integral part of that plan.
Rob Colantuoni
As a CDN service provider, Limelight Networks works with clients to deliver faster Websites, responsive applications, and high-quality video to any device. SVG sat down with Limelight's Rob Colantuoni, advanced services architect, and Micah Vivion, senior product manager, for some technical tips on how to plan and deliver a successful live-streamed event, how to monitor and secure valuable content, and what market segments show the most growth.
How do you work with clients and, specifically, sports clients to help them plan to live-stream their content?
Micah Vivion: We start by sitting down with the customer and understanding what the workflow is. We ask how they publish events; what services, equipment, and players they use; what bitrates they want to stream to; who the audience is; and the devices they're most likely to consume it on. That's a very important part to really understand their entire workflow process. It's important to understand the type of event and the quality they want and then, from there, fine-tune your player or mobile application or desktop device for it. There are many different technical options to consider. You can configure your encoder to best optimize the quality of the stream depending on what type of content it is and the encoder the customer has.
Micah Vivion
Colantuoni: The first step begins with choosing a content-delivery network. Part of your decision should include taking into account your ingest location (where you're streaming from) and whether the CDN that you select has ingest points close to that physical location. Confirm that the CDN can support primary and backup ingest into separate physical locations for redundancy and that their delivery policy supports failover in the event of an outage.
A significant element impacting a live-streaming event is the amount of time the traffic spends on the public Internet. For example, if you are streaming an event in New York, you can publish to a Limelight point of presence [POP] in New York. At that point, the stream is carried on our dedicated backbone until it exits closer to the client. When transiting the Internet, you're ultimately going to run into contention with other public traffic, which will impact stream quality. Limelight Networks has a global private network, so we can drastically reduce the amount of time spent transiting the public Internet, thus improving the user experience.
Another way to ensure viewers receive the best possible viewing experience is with a multi-copy policy. Oftentimes, you may end up getting hot spots on a CDN, especially if you're offering a single live stream to thousands of consumers and certain locations serve more content than others. With Limelight, in each of our POPs, we'll have multiple servers spreading out that load. Ultimately, this reduces contention on the CDN edge servers and allows for an overall better user experience.
You hit on an issue many sports-content providers face: scaling up for big events and thousands of consumers. How do you work with clients to anticipate audience, and how do you manage bandwidth needs?
Colantuoni: If it's a brand-new customer, we'll create an estimate based on a number of factors, such as expected viewership, desired bitrate, and format. If they're an existing customer, we often review prior events with similar viewership and use that in our estimates. Then, we'll configure our tuning and multi-copy policy to match expected load. We recognize there's no second chance on streaming a live event and take extra precautions to ensure success. For example, during delivery, we often have an advanced service architect on the bridge with the client, closely watching the traffic numbers in real time so we can adjust tuning to be more aggressive if there are more viewers than anticipated. Usually, our ballpark figures are high, and we might over-provision, but that's never a bad thing.
Vivion: We have analytics available that report traffic numbers, viewership, device breakdown, formats. Also, in certain cases, depending on the customer's needs, we can help them integrate with third-party analytics as well as help monitor, maintain, and leverage for planning future capacity needs.
Rob, you mentioned delivery. What are some things clients can be doing to make sure that they deliver an exceptional live-streaming experience?
Colantuoni: Have metrics, prepare for worst-case scenario, and understand your escalation workflow. Having metrics available during the event will help you spot issues before they become user-affecting. You need both a primary and backup ingest and a documented set of escalations to deal with things if they fail. If you're running on a mobile platform and the metrics point to a problem with the app, then having an escalation process to the developers is key. If your encoder is failing, then have a process for escalation to your broadcast engineer. With live events, there is very little room for error, and these make a big difference.
Vivion: You have a very fine line to work with when you're dealing with live events. You want to make sure that you're delivering - on the quality side - the formats that the mobile or desktop clients need: HLS, HDS, DASH, MSS. You want to make sure that your ingest stream is a high enough quality so that, when we transrate it - we take it out and break it into different bitrates - there is enough resolution to support the type of quality that you want. And that actually differs with the type of events. If you'
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Content may be king, but when it comes to live-streaming a sports event, that king requires plenty of support to get it where it needs to go. Live streaming takes plenty of planning, and choosing the right content-delivery network (CDN) must be an integral part of that plan.
