Post-traumatic sports streaming (PTSS) – MediaKind

By: Joseph Claypool, VP, Customer Engineering Sales

This isn’t just a minor inconvenience; it’s a catastrophe. For sports fans, downtime or interruptions are simply intolerable.

The hidden costs of downtime

Downtime is not an uncommon thing in the industry that has led to countless headlines through the years, and is still a problem for some. Failing to deliver a seamless experience during such high-stakes moments can tarnish your brand’s reputation faster than you can say “WTF”.

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

Downtime is not just a minor hiccup; it can be a financial black hole. Considering the possibilities of unquantifiable reputational damage, there is more to consider than simple money math. Once your brand is associated with unreliable service, it’s a steep uphill battle to regain trust. Imagine the long-term effects: increased customer churn and the need for heavier investments in marketing and content quality just to recover from the tarnish. Nobody wants to be the streaming service that needs a PR campaign full of apologies and nervous promises to do better.

Common issues & trade-offs

A lot can go wrong when it comes to live streaming, and it’s not just about having a decent compute node. Server capacity and scalability are crucial, but so is managing network congestion and avoiding outages. Software bugs and system failures can sneak up on you like that one player everyone underestimates until they score the winning goal. Then there can be problematic SKUs or regions with infrastructure provisioning issues. Does that Load Balancer you selected really perform under stress, and can your shield cache implementation scale at lightning speed? Leveraging cloud scalability allows for dynamic resource allocation, ensuring that you can handle a sudden influx of viewers without breaking a sweat. Proactive monitoring using AI and analytics helps predict and prevent issues before they become catastrophic. 

It’s like juggling flaming swords while riding a unicycle; one wrong move, and it all comes crashing down… there is no substitute for a service being backed by battle-hardened DevOps engineers to balance & navigate these concerns. Humans often make all the difference.

When it comes to redundancy, implementing fail-safes and backups is not just a good idea; it’s essential. It may be that you want varying levels redundancy for specific channels as you balance the trade-off between cost and uptime. For example… running a live channel in a single public cloud region can only ever offer three 9s or reliability on paper due to the SLAs of underlying cloud provider services, although in practice we far exceed that for our customers. If one wants to achieve five 9s or higher for a particular service, then dual region/cloud deployments is an option with 2x the cost per channel.

Building brand through reliability

Reliability is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have, especially when it comes to live sports. Do you want to avoid giving your sports fans post-traumatic sports streaming (PTSS)?… it’s a real thing. Many of our customers find MediaKind after a commodity solution has fallen down, and stay with us to build & extend on a solid foundation..

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

i love you,

joe