A Look Back at CBS Sports Digital's Strategy for Streaming Super Bowl LIII A multi-CDN approach ensured that contingencies were uneventful By Kristian Hernandez, Assistant Editor
Monday, May 13, 2019 - 12:33 pm
Print This Story
Story Highlights
In today's media landscape, major networks are doing more in the OTT space than just dipping their toes in the water. CBS Sports Digital, for example, tiptoed toward the deep end of the pool with a live stream of Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta. At last week's Streaming Media East in New York City, Taylor Busch, senior director, engineering, CBS Sports Digital, offered a thorough walkthrough of his team's preparation, construction, and execution of its strategy, which was highlighted by an outside-the-box mentality in putting a secondary emphasis on latency.
[Latency] is important to us, he explained, but the most important was the rebuffering rate. Getting the latency down was not really a goal. We wanted to make sure that we had a really good experience for all of our users.
We are able to keep those rebuffering rates very low, he continued. The more aggressive that you get with latency in this kind of workflow, the more potential you'll have for rebuffering, so we were very conservative about that.
Laying the Groundwork
Busch and his colleagues in the streaming department were well-prepared and -connected before the game's first play. With war rooms located in CBS Sports' broadcast center in New York City (for signal transmission and encoding), San Francisco (for the CDN partners), and Busch's headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, FL (for site infrastructure), a direct line of communication was established between the network's employees and the vendors involved with the project.
The big thing was the organization around the war room, Busch said. We needed to figure out how we were going to communicate and how to escalate [the speed of the stream] for people that were [behind] in a particular area; we didn't want them to get bombarded [with a ton of plays all at once]. There was a whole lot of planning that went into this.
The locations were constructed for more than just practice: they were also leveraged during the night's production as a monitoring safety net to detect any issues.
We had a ton of internal tools looking at stream alignment and real-time encoders from the logs, he said. We were using the APIs from the CDNs to figure out, in as real-time as possible, what they were serving. We were able to pump that [information] into our Sumo Logic [cloud-based analytics system] to aggregate and build separate dashboards with that data. Finally, we had a multiviewer, so we were able to see all of the different streams and could visually detect the obvious [problems] very easily.
Reaching Fans in All Corners of the Country
For an event that captivates fans of all 32 teams, especially supporters of the two fortunate enough to be playing, there is virtually no room for error on the distribution front.
To get the job done, CBS Sports Digital fired up multiple CDNs to ensure that every region had access to the OTT product.
We had the signal coming into the New York broadcast center, and we had the luxury of putting our [AWS Elemental] encoders in the same facility, Busch said. We also had a backup facility in [Stamford, CT. With this in mind], we were able to see if there was any issue with latency or anything of that nature. This was really interesting to watch during the event to see where the traffic would derive from.
Along with the effort to include everyone in the U.S., the network showcased that same sentiment of inclusivity with ad insertion. Although the fan experience may have been different for those watching on linear television, viewers watching on-the-go got a taste of the traditional broadcast.
We went through quite a lengthy decision-making process to weigh the options, he reported. We decided to go through a traditional passthrough, so the ads that were on television were the ads that you saw in the stream. We ultimately did a hybrid with tracking of the digital impressions.
Getting Out of Harm's Way: Diverting a Live-Streaming Issue
In live sports productions, there's bound to be a mishap or two. On football's biggest stage, a large wave of consumers bringing tons of activity and traffic can present a worrisome challenge. To combat any foreseeable scenarios, CBS Sports Digital implemented a backup plan that would allow the problem to be fixed without viewer detection.
We were extremely concerned about the ingest and distribution redundancy. We wanted to make sure we had enough leverage to pull during the event, if there was a problem, to hopefully not have any disruption to the end user, Busch said. We did see at one point that there was increased latency. What we did was turn off the [U.S. West 2] region and basically fail over to U.S. East 1. They identified that some of the traffic was public and that was causing the latency. We flipped the U.S. West 2 region back, and there was no interruption or issue to the customers.
Reflecting on his team's work, Busch noted the fruitful and successful relationship between the network and its vendors: The most impressive part of all of this was the amazing cooperation with all of the vendors that we worked with. There were a lot of moving parts, and we really wanted to have fine-grained control over each piece of the workflow.
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
A Look Back at CBS Sports Digital's Strategy for Streaming Super Bowl LIII A multi-CDN approach ensured that contingencies were uneventful By Kristian Hernandez, Assistant Editor 
