NAB
Live sports streamers want to deliver the highest quality stream that a user’s device will support in the available bandwidth, but a panel of industry experts at NAB Show’s Streaming Summit said that many are losing millions of dollars in the process.
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“A lot of streamers are putting unnecessary bits across networks that cost them tens of millions of dollars, where they’re over optimizing for things that aren’t perceivable by users,” said Rob Gelick, former chief product officer at Paramount.
That’s because they are either attempting to stream 4K across networks when there’s little way of monetizing that resolution and/or they are using inefficient delivery and compression techniques.
James Burt SVP of broadcast products at live streaming and VOD platform JW Player, said, “From my perspective 4K comes up little. I mean, the amount of 4K streaming we do very small. Technically, we can do it. We just don’t. The [standard] is 1080p 60. It’s good enough for most of our customers ranging all the way from the tier one sportscasters down to the smaller ones.”
Gelick said that AI technologies could help dial down or dial up the bitrate of each stream to maximize quality depending on the variabilities of end-user bandwidth and device capability.
“So that you can come down to a level where you’re not over delivering. You can dial back the quality just to the level where people can’t perceive that there’s any drop in it. But that material saving, even if that’s five percent, 10 percent, 15 percent of your data costs, is incredible for operators. Streamers are looking to where they can save costs today and that’ll be a big part.”
There’s no problem in terms of production capturing in 4K or upscaling an HD feed to 4K, but the consumer might not see any benefit.
The result, said Gelick, “is doing the exact opposite of you want to do in streaming, which is to put an unnecessarily fat stream through limited pipes and spending a lot of money doing it. Now I think people are getting a little smarter.”
Gelick also decried the “patchwork quilt of third-party technology and homegrown solutions in sports workflows,” as he put it.
“You would probably would be hard pressed to find an end to end video workflow that is actually the same anywhere,” he said. “The good thing is that that means there’s a bunch of really flexible tools out there, where you don’t have to conform to a set standard, or architecture, or platform.”
Most technologies like encoders and packagers are now software defined enabling them to be swapped as needs changed.
“That has worked really well for us since it means we’re not solely reliant on one vendor,” said B. “There are a lot of streamers out there that are all in one technology stack and sometimes that locks you in and it’s very difficult to get out of. We like to have a more modular approach where if this isn’t working for us, we’ll rip that bit out and pop another one back in.”
Overriding any other aspect of the live experience is reliability. They said, the stream simply has to work.
“With VOD you get loads of chances but with live you get one chance,” said Burt. “It has to work. One of the things we focus on a lot is reliability — making sure that the stream is always available. If there’s a problem downstream, that you can manage it.”
A second important consideration is flexibility. “With the way that the market is changing we really need to have flexible solutions to be able to offer live to VOD and to offer multiple monetization techniques,” he said. “Being both flexible and reliable is sort of supercritical in my view.”
If platforms are encouraging fans to sign up to stream the game they had also better be prepared for the last minute peak in traffic. Surprisingly, this remains a trapdoor for some.
“Take The Masters or the Super Bowl or even March Madness, and someone’s coming in to watch — you’d like to think that if they’re a new subscriber that the platform has planned for that ahead of time, but typically, they don’t,” Gelick shared.
“So where you see a lot of the market getting into trouble is if they don’t plan for these peak sign ups. You have a very compressed window, like a minute or two, with a massive amount of people coming into the service, and that impacts everything, not just your video workflow, but how quickly you can write to your database to get someone registered.”
Doubling down on this point, Luciano Escudero, VP of media engineering at services company Sportian Globant, said, “If you’ve invested heavily in sports as a vehicle, maybe it’s the beginning of a season, there’s a good chance that they’re going to stick around for the whole season. But if you have one moment on a key marquee event, then a question is how do you capture that person and expose them to the whole household service not just a dedicated sports service? How can keep them in the service?”
The panelists also discussed the introduction of sports betting into live sports applications, noting that latency is still a major issue. You can’t have someone betting on an event in one location or from a live to air broadcast versus someone watching the live event being streamed if the time delay isn’t matched.
They further noted the arrival of joint sports app between Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox, adding that content discovery for sports still has room for improvement.
“We still haven’t cracked the code on the best way to find content,” said Gelick. “I think we will see a lot of experimentation with bundles and more genre sports verticals appear from niche streamers.”
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