Top Concerns for Sports Streaming Organizations: An Interview with SVG

Wowza believes that innovation goes hand in hand with collaboration and community. Just look at the technical partnerships we touted at this year’s IBC or our placement on Frost’s latest radar as a top three innovation leader among online video platforms (OVPs). That’s why we chose to be Sports Video Group (SVG) gold sponsors this year, backing a prestigious industry organization that promotes communication and collaboration across the sports streaming space.

Wowza has long served sports streaming organizations with our unparalleled live video and live transcoding capabilities. By becoming SVG gold sponsors, we can bring our longstanding expertise and innovative spirit to a broader community of streaming experts. In the following SVG interview, Wowza’s CEO and Co-Founder Dave Stubenvoll elaborates on the challenges of greatest concern to sports streaming organizations, how those organizations can increase fan engagement, and what Wowza specifically brings to the table.

     

Latency for Interactive Use Cases

When asked about challenges, Dave first mentions the desire for reliable low-latency to better accommodate interactive use cases. Sports media lends itself well to interactivity. Passionate fans want more ways to engage with content, from polls and chats to games and betting. Most of the features require low or ultra-low latency, which can be difficult to maintain at a large scale.

 

The Wowza Advantage

Wowza’s real-time streaming at scale solution combines the sub-second latency of WebRTC with an expansive global content delivery network (CDN) to reliably accommodate a million viewers.

 

Reliably Reaching Larger Audiences

Whether you’re planning a feature-rich interactive stream or a straight-forward live stream of your latest sporting event, there’s one thing for certain: the more the merrier. However, audience growth is about more than just getting the word out; many sports streaming organizations struggle to accommodate the streaming load of so many new viewers. Increased server strain can risk significant lag or dropped streams, neither of which will encourage new viewers to return.

 

The Wowza Advantage

Wowza’s CDN uses load balancing to distribute streaming demands across a network of servers and reduce the risk of stream failure. This applies both to traditional Wowza live streaming and the ultra-low latency real-time streaming mentioned above.

 

Understanding Audiences of All Sizes

Sports streaming organizations want more insight into who is watching, from where, and for how long. They want a better understanding of what types of streaming content resonate more with what demographics. In an industry inundated with content and vendors eager to deliver it, it’s essential that these organizations understand their audiences and what they want in order to deliver the best possible experience.

 

The Wowza Advantage

Wowza has long offered end-to-end streaming analytics, providing insights into both streaming performance and audiences. Recently, Wowza has expanded its analytics offerings, including player-specific analytics that provide valuable information about stream quality.

 

Maximizing Video Utility

What do you do when your live sporting event stream ends? Do you store the footage somewhere? Delete it? Forget about it entirely? Many sports streaming organizations are looking to extend the life of their content, making it available for watching on-demand or splicing it into segments for highlight reels and post-game commentary. However, these strategies can be complicated if you don’t have the right tools.

 

The Wowza Advantage

Wowza has long been a leader in live video streaming but has since expanded to include more VOD-focused functionality. The combination of these makes us ideally suited for live-to-VOD workflows, allowing you to capture your sporting events as you stream them and easily organize them for playback using a variety of content management tools.

 

Knowing Total Cost of Ownership

As your sports streaming needs get more complex, you might find yourself mixing and matching vendors to build your desired solution. Add to that the fact that many vendors aren’t particularly transparent in their pricing, and it’s easy to lose sight of how much your solution is costing you. This can make it difficult to plan for the future and control creeping costs that result in greater spend than necessary.

 

The Wowza Advantage

Wowza’s benefit to those looking to understand and control costs is twofold. The combination of our core technology with the strong tech partnerships we’ve built over the years allows us to provide a comprehensive streaming solution, including CDN, digital rights management (DRM), content management, monetization, and more. More to the point, we’ve recently simplified our pricing structures, making it significantly easier to predict total cost of ownership (TOC).

 

Increasing Fan Engagement

This is both a challenge in its own right and the crossroads at which all these other challenges meet. Implementing more interactivity and building community around your streams will increase fan engagement. But to make all of that work, you need a scalable and affordable streaming solution. You can also turn to audience insights and data around stream performances to further refine and improve your offerings. Ultimately, everything comes down to growing your fan base and keeping them coming back.

 

The Wowza Advantage

Given Wowza’s adherence to customer needs and ability to meet those needs outlined above, we are well positioned to help sports streaming organizations grow and engage their audiences. We have been powering video since 2007 with technology that touches around 60% of all online video platforms (OVPs) and a third of all CDNs. Now we offer sports streaming organizations a wide range of integration options, flexible deployment models, and a best-in-class online video player so they can build and deliver the experience they most want for their audience.