In live sports streaming, some minutes are more important than others
Broadcasters have long been aware of the problems of an interruption in programming or broadcasting.
Dead air – when silence is accidentally broadcast in place of regular content – continues to cause maximum inconvenience for traditional TV and radio broadcasters, not least because in those crucial seconds of nothingness, people have the opportunity (and tendency) to to switch, either somewhere else or out. .
For online streaming, the equivalent experience is glitches (in network or backend services) that manifest as streams that pixelate, break up, excessively buffer, or stop working altogether.
How important those lost seconds or minutes are for a stream depends greatly on the nature of the event. In live sports, an early failure can mean the difference between seeing a world record being set and not.
Regional Leader for Northern Europe at Cisco ThousandEyes.
Insight into short-lived connections
Within a live sports broadcast, not all minutes are equal. Proportionally, a minute in the context of the 100 meter sprint at the Olympic Games weighs more than a minute in a 90-minute football match.
In the sprint, a lost minute could mean missing the color commentary introduction and the 10-second race in its entirety; in a 90-minute game, the best-case scenario is losing a relatively boring passage of play.
The exception to this is when a lost minute of the 90-minute match includes a clutch play: where a crucial score is scored or a controversial penalty is awarded. Then that minute is just as important for the broadcast as the one in which the final of the 100 meter sprint is recorded.
The challenge for a streaming provider is that it is impossible to know in advance with any certainty which minutes of a live broadcast will be the most crucial: so it is necessary to treat every minute as crucial.
One thing that can help streamers – and the service providers who provide streams to customers – is to become more data-driven in their approach, using visibility to understand the ephemeral nature of the connection between the broadcast site and the end-user audience at any point in the world to understand. time.
This insight is useful for making more informed conversations that can optimize the streaming experience, such as performing dynamic resource allocation and routing streams, based on how the live event is playing out.
Predicting the internet path
Top sports streaming providers are increasingly using software agents at various points in the content delivery chain to understand what the stream looks like as it makes its way to the consumer.
These software agents can run on the live site, where microwave or satellite links are used to send content back to a central transmission coordination center; in the data center and cloud, tracing the path that content takes as it is sent to a content delivery network (CDN) for further distribution; and into consumers’ homes, up to the point where the content reaches the end user’s modem or smart TV.
At all these different points (hops) in the digital supply chain, latency and delay can be measured, giving an indication of where the ultimate streaming experience is landing and whether a performance bottleneck exists that needs further investigation.
Visibility and measurement are especially important where content moves from private network connections to the public Internet. The nature of the Internet and its underlying network infrastructure means that the paths available for traffic are always evolving and constantly changing. Each time a livestream occurs, it will likely encounter a different set of environmental conditions and follow a slightly different path to reach the end user.
The predictability of that path depends on how much intelligence the sports or livestream provider has about it. The greater the visibility, the more predictable the path to the end user is, because the provider can make conscious choices about which network providers to partner with, based on an understanding of how each routes or reroutes traffic under different conditions. . It also makes identification of a fault domain easier, in case a performance bottleneck is identified that requires recovery while the stream is taking place.
The best-placed live sports streaming providers are able to validate underlying network conditions before going live with a broadcast. By setting up tests that show how a stream would perform for different users in different geographic locations, they can best understand what’s happening in advance. They also have a reference point with which to monitor performance over the duration of the streaming event.
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