4 Things to Look for in an OTT Sports Streaming Platform Provider

Choosing the right OTT sports streaming platform provider is crucial for broadcasters who want to deliver high-quality live sporting events to their audience. With the increasing demand for OTT streaming, it’s essential to select a platform that not only meets general streaming needs but also addresses the unique challenges of live sports broadcasting.

An OTT platform provider offers the infrastructure and tools needed to deliver video content directly over the internet, bypassing traditional broadcasting channels. These providers enable broadcasters to stream live and on-demand content to various devices, including smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. For sports broadcasters, an OTT platform provider should offer features that cater specifically to the demands of live sports streaming.

When evaluating OTT platform providers, broadcasters should consider several key factors that contribute to a successful streaming experience.

 

1. Reliability and Scalability

THE PROBLEM: Major sporting events can attract millions of viewers simultaneously. Sometimes these viewership increases can come in the form of unexpected surges. While this may sound like a good thing, it can quickly turn into a nightmare if your infrastructure buckles on under the weight of all those streams, resulting in poor quality at best and stream failure at worst.

THE OTT SOLUTION: A reliable OTT platform will handle large audiences, including having the ability to dynamically scale in the face of sudden traffic spikes, without compromising stream quality or availability.

THE TECH: OTT platform provider accomplish this in a variety of ways, not the least of which is via a content delivery network (CDN). Content delivery networks use load balancing to spread out the demands of a high traffic live stream between multiple servers at strategic locations across a geographic region. If one server fails or is the target of a DDoS attack, the other servers take up the slack, ensuring viewers have an uninterrupted experience.

HIGHLIGHT: Wowza’s expansive global CDN pairs well with WebRTC ultra-low latency for real-time streaming to large audiences.

 

2. Real-Time Insights

THE PROBLEM: Sometimes sports broadcasters don’t know a stream is going to have playback issues, such as buffering and lag, until it’s too late. In some cases, they may not even know there was an issue until after the broadcast concludes.

THE OTT SOLUTION: Monitoring stream performance in real-time is vital for maintaining high-quality broadcasts, allowing broadcasters to quickly identify and resolve issues such as buffering and latency. OTT providers typically come with real-time analytics in their arsenal. The right OTT provider will be able to track everything from stream quality and video bitrate to user engagement and give broadcasters the tools they need to adjust the stream as needed.

THE TECH: Real-time analytics is as much about presentation as speed. A robust analytics platform not only tracks the data reliably, but also provides that data to broadcasters in a digestible format that’s easy to understand and react to. After all, there’s no point in real-time data if it takes you an hour to analyze it.

HIGHLIGHT: Wowza continues to evolve our end-to-end analytics offering, including more robust quality of experience (QOE) analytics for our online video player.

 

3. Ability to Accommodate Viewers

THE PROBLEM: Sports broadcasters have control over the quality of their recording. They can decide how resource heavy it will be and how effectively it is encoded for delivery (within reason). However, they can’t determine what devices their viewers are streaming on or the amount of any given viewer’s bandwidth. In other words, your high-resolution live stream is going to look like a whole lot of nothing to a viewer watching on a tablet from a local coffee shop.

THE OTT SOLUTION: OTT platform providers have a few tricks up their sleeve for addressing this exact issue. Workflows like variable bitrate streaming (VBR) and adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) result in streams going out at different bitrates to accommodate different viewer-side limitations. ABR dynamically adjusts the video bitrate of individual streaming packets in response to feedback received about the viewer side bandwidth. This results in the best possible stream quality for each individual viewer without risking buffering.

THE TECH: ABR relies on effective live transcoding. Encoding is the act of compressing a media file for delivery across a network. This determines the bitrate, among other things, for that media file. Transcoding is the act of decompressing and recompressing these media files. When done live, transcoding constantly adjusts these files as they pass through a media server on their way to the viewer. Given its dynamic nature, live transcoding needs to be fast and reliable without losing video data along the way. This is especially important for live sports streaming where every second counts.

HIGHLIGHT: Wowza live transcodes over 30 million video hours each month, making us one of the most reliable live transcoders in the industry.

 

4. High Quality Player

THE PROBLEM: Grainy footage won’t cut it if you’re streaming a live sporting event. It won’t just affect the overall quality, the way it might for a concert or talk show, it will cause viewers to actively miss out on critical plays, making the stream nigh unwatchable.

THE OTT SOLUTION: Simple. A good OTT platform includes a good online video player. Granted viewers are still at the mercy of their bandwidth and devices. But a quality media player can help mitigate how much those limitations affect their experience. Make sure your player works as well on mobile as it does on a big screen. Give viewers pause and playback tools to allow them to rewatch plays they may have missed.

THE TECH: The player is the viewer’s interface with the content, so it must be intuitive and user-friendly. A good player goes beyond just pause, playback, and mobile friendliness. Look for features like multi-camera angle toggling, multi-language captioning, community chat, and instant replays to enhance the viewing experience and keep people coming back.

HIGHLIGHT: Wowza’s best-in-class video is the first online video player to come pre-integrated with WebRTC for ultra-low latency streaming.

 

Get Started on the Right Foot

Choosing the right OTT sports streaming platform provider involves understanding the specific needs of live sports broadcasting and ensuring that the provider can meet those needs. From scalability to real-time analytics and adaptive bitrate streaming, the right platform can make all the difference in delivering a top-notch viewing experience.

How can you find an OTT platform with everything you need? Consider Wowza.