What the 2024 “Summer of Sports” Teaches Us About the Future of Streaming

The summer of 2024 offered sports programs that rivaled any other year in history. Be it that Copa America finals, Tour of France, NBA Finals, two major golf tournaments, ICC World T20, Wimbledon, US Opena group of Formula 1 Grand Prix‘s, or was recently completed Paris Olympics and Paralympics -If you love sports, June to August is a real treat! So far, I have been able to recount these events without mentioning recent events European Football Association European Football Championship, which concluded in July and had Global cumulative audience is estimated at 5 billion viewers. In short, live sports attract huge audiences all over the world, especially in a year like this.

In previous eras, mass sporting events, such as soccer leagues and the Olympic Games’ audience of approximately 3 billion, relied on satellite and terrestrial television broadcast distribution. However, today, the Internet and intellectual property have almost taken over, not only in content contribution but increasingly as the viewer’s last mile. This shift is largely due to the advent of live streaming. According to data from Nielsen, a media analysis companyAbout 40% of total TV consumption is broadcast, Compared to 50% of satellite and terrestrial channels. Streaming offers conveniences like compatibility with smart mobile devices, access to 1080p and even 4K content, as well as pause and rewind functions that aren’t always available with older cable and satellite TV alternatives.

Latency and capacity issues

IP-based delivery of content has shown almost linear growth in all markets, but there are some notable downsides. Take this example from the recent European Football Championship. For the quarter-final match between England and Switzerland, which the only broadcast channel in the UK was the BBC, it was astonishing. 26 million people watched the match – More than 60% of the adult population in the United Kingdom. Even more surprisingly, nearly 9 million viewers watched the coverage via the BBC iPlayer streaming service, which delivered a broadcast about 40 seconds behind live television. This latency issue is being addressed by delivering more edge-based content, but it still represents a major challenge for IP to completely replace terrestrial broadcasting.

The other issue is capacity. According to the Benton Broadband and Society Institutewhich examined FCC data, as of December 2022, the average download speed for all residential fixed broadband subscriptions was 439 Mbps, while the average residential download speed was 300 Mbps. Nearly 79% of all residential subscriptions have a download speed of at least 100 Mbps. Even with the 100 Mbps threshold, media streamed over IP—unlike cable, satellite, or terrestrial TV—is delivered on a per-viewer stream rather than a one-to-many stream.

Consider the 2024 Super Bowl, which attracted a record 120 million viewers (most of them in North America), of whom nearly 8 million watched the game broadcast online. Broadcasting 8 million 1080p streams at 5 Mbps increases US internet load by 40 terabits per second. If all 120 million viewers streamed a future Super Bowl exclusively in 4K at 15 Mbps, the download would rise to 1,800 terabits per second — the equivalent of 1.5x International Internet bandwidth capacity.

Although this is a purely hypothetical scenario, there simply isn’t enough network capacity among the more than 3,000 ISPs in the United States to offer a fully streamed Super Bowl. However, it highlights the inherent challenge and why content delivery networks (CDNs) have become crucial to the success of large-scale live sports.

Deliver content smarter

In its annual live streaming survey Among more than 250 streaming providers across the US and Europe, Qwilt asked participants several questions about “Plan and implement a live-streamed group eventUnsurprisingly, CDN performance is “The biggest technical concern“For about a third of respondents. The importance of content delivery CDNs remains essential; they move content to a distribution point closer to the viewer. However, there is a glaring weakness in the architecture and operational practices of today’s traditional CDNs, as they often flood the access networks of ISPs with millions Redundant individual streams during mass live events Through caching deeply integrated into the ISP, Open Caching solves this problem, offloading almost all redundant live streams from the exchange points and the ISP’s core network.

Many existing functions – such as pause and rewind – are just the tip of a potential iceberg as content delivery becomes more dynamic and smarter. For example, future innovations like live streaming from helmet cameras, augmented reality, and super-resolution such as 8K or 360-degree video are moving from the drawing board to possibility. There are also some inherent challenges that CDNs mitigate, such as upgrading ISP networks and devices to support a more efficient multicast model of content distribution. On the plus side, openness and interoperability through specifications like Open Caching, as promoted by the Streaming Video Technology Alliance, helps make it easier to standardize caching systems within an ISP to work more seamlessly within a unified delivery model.

Streaming quality is important

Historically, sports broadcasting rights have been acquired by a single broadcaster, ensuring exclusivity. Major sports franchises are increasingly providing rights to multiple publishers today and in the future. Take for example the Champions League, Europe’s most profitable tournament, which has increased revenues from €569 million across 14 rights holders in 2003 to €3.2 billion across 70 rights holders in the 2023/24 season. Today, in major European countries, there are at least three competing rights holders and, in some cases, at least two broadcasting options. In the United States, the National Football League, the world’s most valuable sports league per game, has five rights holders, including Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, FOX, and NBC. Although they are somewhat separate to avoid direct competition, each has streaming services as an option alongside traditional streaming delivery.

In this increasingly likely scenario of competing streaming services offering the same game, the quality of the streaming experience across buffering delays, image quality, and latency will become more important. Choosing a CDN provider and underlying technology will turn out to be a key factor in attracting and retaining viewers.

[Editor’s note: This is a contributed article from Qwilt. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]

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