Ott Live Sports Streaming – the new normal?

As a child, I remember that I saw Pay-Per-View boxes on HBO and showtime. I grew up on ESPN with the NBA on TNT, Major League Baseball and European Soccer.

Fast lead by 2025 and we see more and more top sports of terrestrial, cable and satellite television on modern OTT and CTV solutions. And the effects are significant.

Since the NFL superbowl is streamed live all over the world and the UEFA Champions League watch shortly before entering the KO levels, most of us see these events about live streaming. It is fascinating to think of quick transformation in our global consumption habits over a few decades. We can now look at these events practically anywhere in the world.

I thought it would be worth thinking about the shift in technology and the cultural effects of this transformation.

I work for the world's leading business intelligence company for video streaming providers. We have many customers who are OTTS, radio loss and publishers of live sports events -of which are some live stream sports, including the Superbowl. Streaming infrastructure and investment behind these companies is considerable. And technical support is crucial for providing a service suitable for the purpose.

However, the biggest challenges are the scalability and quality of experience. Live events always mean a large increase in traffic. An Ott platform can switch to potentially millions of people in a few minutes from 20,000 spectators. This exposes enormous pressure on the infrastructure of an OTT.

While we take it for granted to the consumer, the OTT provider has to prepare for qualities, latency or failures. And you have to act quickly in real time to identify and alleviate quality problems. Or you will lose customers. This is the type of animal with live streaming, especially if you are an established brand with potentially millions of customers.

Even the largest and brightest platforms can and carry out failures. We saw this in real time with the repeated failures, delays and crashes in the last top -class box matches on Netflix and DAZN.

Since Ott live streaming becomes everyday, certain technologies are absolutely necessary for a stable video service in which paid customers can fully trust. If Ott is to exceed traditional television, quality problems must be eliminated.

Let us quickly discuss some important findings -what you have to pay attention to and what you can expect with live sports streaming.

The problems that can already be seen in live streaming sports events

We saw complete failures, buffers and latency problems and then the user cannot view pay-per-view content. This is time -critical content and nobody wants their neighbors to scream when a touchdown is achieved and they missed it.

Growth in Live Sportsviewership

We see a massive increase in all customers when live streaming events occur. We saw this last year with the euro 2024 and the Olympic Games in Paris. There is a huge highlight and your video product must be scalable. During these live events, you must also be up to date on QOE/QOS topics.

Customer trends in subscription and view

If the streaming problems are problematic, what drives customer behavior? We see a negative mood when users see poor video quality, failures, etc. If you as an OTT provider spend a lot of money on streaming rights, the negative effects can be great on social media and in public, customer expectations are not fulfilled . And the worst scenario is that in the end they lose subscribers.

What can go wrong with a live stream?

A wide range of technical problems can occur that can lead to poor video quality:

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  Record problems (capture and coding) – A hardware or software error in the coding device can prevent the electricity from being transferred.
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  Code delays – If the encoder is overloaded or configured incorrectly.
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  Wrong Codec settings – Use of an incompatible codec or bit rate.
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  CDN overload or geographical caching problems – Users can experience delays if the next Edge server is overloaded.
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  Bad adaptive bit rate streaming (ABR) implementation – Users can also experience buffer or poor quality with sufficient bandwidth.
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  Infrastructure scalability problems – like server overload. If backend services (authentication, analysis, etc.) are not properly scaled, you can crash.
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  Delays in automatic scaling – If the cloud infrastructure does not scaled quickly enough, some users can have buffering or failed connections.
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  Network and connectivity problems – ISP throttle or network overload.

What Live Streamer should prepare

These are problems against which Ott platforms have to insulate in front of and during live sports flows with a high volume. A streaming provider wants to improve the quality, keep commitment stable and avoid negative conversations about quality by helping with the identification of problems in real time. Using end-to-end monitoring solutions, from content to end users, we can see problems in every step along the supply chain.

A multi-CDN strategy is a must

In addition, every live sports event must have an intelligent multi-CDN architecture with a “mid-stream switching”. The number of users who establish a connection with a single CDN can lead to crashes and lead. A multi-CDN with mid-stream switching can change the CDNs if problems with video quality are discovered. We always recommend having 2-3 CDN companies, so that no single CDN is susceptible to a company-wide failure. In the past, we have seen this with some of the world's largest CDN companies with global failures, which leads to the loss of millions of dollars. Switching the start is not sufficient for live streaming, since spikes occur regularly in traffic and a single CDN can overload. The status of the CDN at the beginning of a stream does not remain constant. That is why a CDN balancer that can change in the middle of the electricity is absolutely crucial.

The future of Live Sport -Streaming

It is crystal clear that internet -based streaming, be it IPTV, Ott, CTV or newer aspiring technologies, will be the standard in the coming years. Reliability and scalability are the big question marks that have to be answered constantly. It is our task as a provider and as a consumer to demand better quality, to develop and cross the limits of video streaming, as we really enter a golden age of the mass media.

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