Post Traumatic Sports Streaming (PTSS) – MediaKind

By: Joseph Claypool, VP, Customer Engineering Sales

Imagine this: It’s the final moments of the big game. The score is tied and everyone sits tensely in their seats. Suddenly the electricity stops. You throw your hands up and curse the gods who rule the internet for ruining perhaps the most exciting moment of the season. Now you’re stuck refreshing your stream and missing out on the live action that everyone else is witnessing.

This isn’t just a minor inconvenience; it is a disaster. For sports fans, downtime or interruptions are simply unbearable.

The hidden costs of downtime

Downtime is not uncommon in the industry, has made countless headlines over the years, and is still a problem for some. Failing to provide a seamless experience at such important moments can damage your brand’s reputation faster than you can ” “WTF” can be said.

Conversely, you drive brand differentiation and customer loyalty when you ensure consistent reliability and a seamless user experience. Your service is like a magnet. Your brand has a certain charisma. But if you mess up, you’re the villain in the story, the one who ruined the big game. Sports fans are passionate and never forget.

Downtime isn’t just a small mistake; It can be a financial black hole. Given the possibility of unquantifiable reputational damage, there is more to consider than simple monetary calculations. Once your brand is associated with unreliable service, it’s an uphill battle to regain trust. Imagine the long-term impact: increased customer churn and the need for greater investment in marketing and content quality just to recover from the lull. Nobody wants to be the streaming service that needs a PR campaign full of apologies and nervous promises to do better.

Common problems and compromises

A lot can go wrong with live streaming, and it’s not just about a decent compute node. Server capacity and scalability are critical, but so is managing network congestion and avoiding outages. Software errors and system failures can creep in like a player everyone underestimates until he scores the game-winning goal. Then there may be problematic SKUs or regions with infrastructure deployment issues. Does the load balancer you choose truly perform under load and can your Shield Cache implementation scale at lightning speed? Leveraging cloud scalability allows for dynamic resource allocation, ensuring you can handle a sudden influx of viewers without breaking a sweat. Proactive monitoring using AI and analytics helps predict and prevent problems before they become catastrophic.

It’s like juggling flaming swords while riding a unicycle; One wrong step and everything collapses. There is no substitute for a service backed by battle-tested DevOps engineers to balance and address these concerns. People often make the difference.

When it comes to redundancy, implementing failovers and backups isn’t just a good idea; It is important. You may want different levels of redundancy for specific channels to balance the trade-off between cost and uptime. For example, operating a live channel in a single public cloud region may only ever provide three nines or reliability on paper due to the SLAs of the underlying cloud provider services, although in practice we far exceed these for our customers. If you want to get five nines or more for a particular service, dual-region/cloud deployments are an option at twice the cost per channel.

Brand building through reliability

Reliability isn’t just a nice thing; It’s a must-watch, especially when it comes to live sports. Want to avoid giving your sports fans post-traumatic sports streaming (PTSS)? …this is a real thing. Many of our customers find MediaKind after an off-the-shelf solution fails and stay with us to build and expand on a solid foundation.

If you are interested in differentiating your brand and ready to improve the stability of your live sports streaming, you can contact us here. Let us know how we can help.

I love you,

Joe