Soccer championships: the Biggest Challenge for Online Broadcasters in 2022!

Over the past decade, video consumption has shifted toward online streaming, allowing broadcasters to deliver a more personalized experience and opening the door to a flood of live and VoD content. This trend supported the fast growth of OTT streaming to the detriment of traditional broadcasting via DTT or satellite. Like in most verticals, the Covid pandemic has helped boost growth even faster because of the imposed remote consumption of cultural and sporting events.

The world professional soccer championships, set to begin in Qatar in November, is the best example of a global event that can be enjoyed mainly on television, and increasingly on the move from a laptop, tablet or mobile device.

Broadcasting an event like this soccer tournament requires rethinking the existing streaming strategy before the event, because the infrastructure currently in place was designed for stable, or at least predictable, video traffic. The challenge, therefore, is to plan for a cyclical and exponential increase in audience size during the games, and ultimately maintain the highest-quality user experience.

The Challenge: a Seamless Streaming Experience

Like the 2022 soccer championships, which takes place every four years, there are many recurring high-profile events watched by millions around the world, like the Olympic Games, the Super Bowl, Eurovision, and the Tour de France. The time between them is an opportunity to update infrastructure and streaming systems to the latest standards, accommodate changing use patterns, and introduce new services.

Recent global competitions have seen a significant increase in the share of online streaming over traditional broadcasting like DTT or satellite, and this year’s event is expected to reinforce the trend. One of the biggest streaming challenges in such events is delivering the same streaming quality to every user, regardless of whether there are a thousand or a million viewers. The platform must therefore be able to instantly scale the streaming infrastructure for a very limited period of time, and ensure reliability at massive and unpredictable peak consumption times.

These challenges underscore a viewing quality objective that is crucial to achieve, because viewers are not prepared to give up the DTT or satellite quality they are used to simply because of a change in viewing medium.

There are several possible solutions to these scalability and reliability challenges in the context of recurring massive audience spikes.

The Hybrid Approach: Multi-CDN and Peer-to-Peer Delivery

Whether deployed by the broadcaster or outsources to a service provider, the content delivery network (CDN) is the foundation for any video streaming platform. However, to overcome the risks of infrastructure overload and solve the scalability and reliability problem for one-off, high-consumption events, several CDN strategies are possible:

The Multi-CDN Approach: In this scenario a broadcaster uses several CDNs simultaneously to mitigate the risk of failure and increase streaming capacity. Popular among broadcasters delivering content to multiple geographic regions, this approach offers optimal coverage, as the CDN offering the best performance and highest capacity in each region is chosen over the other options. A broadcaster must determine, however, the optimal number of CDNs, and the tools needed to switch between them. Using 10 or more CDNs, for example can pose serious technical constraints while reducing the financial benefit of a multi-CDN architecture by limiting economies of scale.

For optimized switching between CDNs there are solutions capable of switching from one CDN to another in real time in the event of a quality issue without any impact on the end user, and with a highly granular measurement of service quality.

Peer-to-Peer Solutions: Because CDNs all use the same local ISPs to ultimately get to viewers’ eyes, they share a finite set of resources that can get heavily congested in high-profile events. Peer-to-peer video streaming solutions enable the exchange of video segments between different users who are watching the same content at the same time, and thus become part of the video delivery workflow. The peer-to-peer solution thus acts as an “augmented CDN” that can be activated on demand for the duration of a specific event, rendering the streaming more reliable and increasing the capacity of the platform.

Hybrid media delivery solutions combining both multiple CDNs and a peer-to-peer network can also be implemented to provide reliable streaming for high-profile, high-consumption events. This is the right time to develop the streaming strategy for the upcoming soccer championships, most likely the biggest streaming event of 2022.

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