On December 19th, 2024 at the SVG Summit in New York, the SVTA Streaming Sports Council kicked off with an inaugural meeting including 25 attendees, some of whom attended in person while others dialed in. The attendees for this inaugural meeting were:
- Glenn Deen (Comcast)
- Paul Strickland (vecima)
- Christine Holligan (vecima)
- David Eisnbacher (EZDRM)
- Victoria (Elecard)
- Alex Giladi (Comcast)
- ErinRose (Verizon)
- Simon Brighton (Synamedia)
- John Barber (AWS)
- Dave Prail (Netskrt)
- Paul Boustead (Dolby)
- Dimitry (Elecard)
- Bhavesh (SME)
- Scott Laubach (Comcast Cable)
- Alan Young (Zixi)
- Ali Begen (Comcast)
- Barry Owen (Wowza)
- Gwendal Simon (Synamedia)
- Jaya Devabhaktuni (Velocix)
- Jorge (SME)
- Scott Bishop (Fastly)
- Shekhar Yeleswarapu (Irdeto)
- Walter Bardelle (MainStreaming)
- Jon Anderson (Velocix)
- Satish (Velocix)
During this initial gathering, the group discussed the council’s purpose and then dug into some of the technology challenges facing streaming live sports at scale. Some of the broad categories included multiple camera sources, camera ingestion, data overlays, content transport and packaging in real-time, and, of course, latency.
But as the group talked about a variety of challenges, there began to emerge a desire to categorize the challenges so that they could be addressed more specifically and based on specific use cases. At the highest level, the group initially talked about the following three categories:
- Quality–these are challenges such as latency, scaling, encoding/packaging, and delivery
- Access–these are challenges such as security and rights
- Experience–these are challenges such as multi-view, immersive, data overlays, and personalization
With these categories initially established, the group began looking at how the kind of event impacts (and even changes) the technological challenges. For example, a single event on a high school field has a far different set of challenges across those categories than does a professional sporting event at an arena. The group came up with a broad grouping of use cases that included:
- UGC
- Single-event (one-off) [Infrastructure]
- Single-event (one-off) [Non-infrastructure]
- Multi-event (recurring)
- Arena (fixed)
- Arena (remote)
- Non-arena (no infrastructure)
- Team
- Individual
By starting at the category level and discussing how different sporting events might impact the challenges they face, the group then began to just talk about some of these which could be, at some point, categorized and applied to different use cases. An idea was forming about some kind of matrix which would align technology challenges not only with categories and use cases but with the business. It became clear during the discussion that just pointing out technical challenges couldn’t be the primary objective. Those technical challenges needed to be matched to the business as well–revenue, monetization, and prioritization. Some of the broad range of technical issues included discussions about:
- Rapid scaling–how can sports streamers deal with issues that arise during rapid scaling?
- Infrastructure management–how can streamers deal with efficiently spinning up and spinning down elastic resources?
- Real-time issue mitigation–what happens, for example, if everyone refreshes their stream at the same time? It would be like kicking everyone out of the arena while the game is going on and asking them to all come back in.
- Data capture and integration–how can streamers deal with ingesting and integrating multiple data sources in real time?
- Device fragmentation–while devices need to be deprecated (as a security posture), how can a sports streamer properly categorize and keep up with devices so that they understand which are compromised and which aren’t (and is it even possible to keep some of them around and just deliver lower quality content to them)?
- Transport selection–what is the optimum format for ingest and how can than be optimized for specific use cases (i.e., event on a high school field versus an event at an arena)?
- Edge services–how can caching be optimized for specific types of events?
What bubbled up from these general discussions about technology were some “big picture challenges”:
- Challenge #1–multi-view experiences
- Challenge #2–IP transport through ISPs
- Challenge #3–rapid scaling
But those challenges, again, differed according to the type of event. Not only, though, where it was located, but also the kind of production value and how it scaled by according to the type of connection (fixed, wireless, phone, etc.). Like many discussions, the act of talking about categories, use cases, and technologies led the group to imagine a sorting of the technical challenges into groups reflecting a scale of connection and production value:
- Fixed (permanent)
- Scale by connection and production value?:
- High (arena)
- Low (ice rink)
- Scale by connection and production value?:
- Fixed (setup for a specific event)
- Scale by connection:
- High (arena)
- Low (kid’s sporting event)
- Scale by connection:
- Dynamic (infrastructure, like cameras, that may move)
- Scale by connection:
- High: Professional camera with 5G bonded
- Value: Person with cell phone
- Scale by connection:
So looking back at the Big Challenges and all of the general technical discussions, it’s possible to build a multi-dimensional matrix something like this:
| Connection Type | Technical Challenge | Technical Challenge | Technical Challenge | Technical Challenge | Production Value | |
| Fixed (permanent) | 1 | 3 | High (professional arena) | |||
| Fixed (permanent) | Low (local ice rink) | |||||
| Fixed (one-time, specific event) | High (professional arena) | |||||
| Fixed (one-time, specific event) | Low (kid’s sporting event) | |||||
| Dynamic (infrastructure that moves) | High (pro camera with 5G bonded) | |||||
| Dynamic (infrastructure that moves) | Low (person with a cell phone) | |||||
So the idea would be to divide the boxes (as illustrated) where the color on the right reflects that the technical challenge is applicable to that connection type and the color on the right reflects that the technical challenge is applicable to production value. But, back to the earlier realization that any matrix or discussion of technical challenges required a mapping to the business, the number represents how important that challenge is to the business of a sports stream with that connection type and/or production value.
What are the next steps? The council will hopefully convene at our first meeting of 2025 in Tucson, AZ from March 4th thru 6th. During this time, we will start to get really granular about these technical challenges, potentially filling out some of this matrix and even defining the challenges in more detail. Again, this council isn’t intending to solve the technical challenges, just to identify them. We hope that in doing so, we can provide potential topics to our working groups and even other industry events focused on sports streaming.
