2024 saw a boom in live streaming, with companies like DAZN and ESPN+ being joined by Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which both started broadcasting live sporting events. This is a huge shift away from Cable/Satellite broadcasting towards more modern over-the-top (OTT) solutions. We touched on this in a recently published article Live Streaming Sports and the OTT Landscape.
But sometimes these innovations come with a cost to the consumer and the OTT Provider. Last year we saw some OTT platforms suffer from Quality of Service/Quality of Experience issues during live streams. Scalability proved to be a real-world challenge, as thousands of subscribers reported outages during high profile pay-per-view boxing events – Jake Paul v Mike Tyson, as well as Oleksandr Usyk vs. Tyson Fury.
What’s behind this drop in quality? Let’s take a look at what goes into producing a top quality OTT live stream, focusing on key areas:
- OTT platforms
- Content delivery networks (CDNs)
- QoE/QoS Monitoring & Analytics
- User Engagement, Recommendation & Personalization
OTT Platforms: The Backbone of Streaming TV
At the heart of any live streaming service sits the OTT platform – a technology stack designed to handle content ingestion, processing, distribution, playback and monetization. An effective OTT platform ensures reliable delivery, supports various devices, and provides a smooth user experience.
- Content Management System (CMS): OTT platforms rely on robust CMS solutions to organize, store, and manage video assets. These systems enable seamless uploading, transcoding, and scheduling of live streams.
- Scalability and Cloud Integration: A critical requirement for live events with unpredictable viewership spikes. Amazon Prime Video’s infrastructure relies heavily on Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing elasticity to scale up during peak live sports or global premieres.
- Device Compatibility and APIs: Ensuring compatibility across smart TVs, mobile devices, desktops, and gaming consoles is crucial. OTT platforms use APIs to integrate seamlessly with various devices, enabling a consistent viewing experience.
- Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR): ABR technology dynamically adjusts the video quality based on the user’s internet bandwidth, ensuring smooth playback without buffering.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): The Backbone of Live Streaming
CDNs are the backbone of OTT live streaming, enabling fast and reliable content delivery to viewers across the globe. They minimize latency, reduce buffering, and ensure high-quality streams, regardless of geographic location.
- Edge Servers for Low Latency: CDNs use a network of edge servers strategically placed worldwide to deliver content quickly. Live events often attract millions of concurrent viewers. CDNs like Akamai and Cloudflare provide the infrastructure to handle such large-scale traffic. Another interesting technology is Netflix’s Open Connect. Their system of over 1000 interconnected global ISPs ensures localized delivery, reducing latency and enhancing streaming quality for live and on-demand content.
- Dynamic Caching: CDNs cache content closer to the end-user, reducing server load and improving delivery speeds. Amazon Prime Video leverages dynamic caching techniques to ensure smooth streaming during high-demand events, such as live sports or award shows.
- Multi-CDN infrastructure: Having multiple CDNs, ideally from different vendors, ensures scalability whenever there is degradation in streaming quality. The use of a CDN Balancer, such as NPAW’s CDN Mid-Stream, bulletproofs the stream against crashes, lengthy join times and rendition switches. This is achieved by switching to the best performing CDN – in real-time – whenever there is fluctuation in video quality. CDN Mid-Stream switching also helps OTTs save on cost, by switching to a more affordable CDN when quality permits.
- Adaptive Routing: Intelligent routing algorithms help CDNs avoid congested paths on the internet, ensuring uninterrupted streams. ESPN+ benefits from CDN solutions that dynamically reroute traffic, maintaining stream quality even during network disruptions.
Analytics: Data-Driven Insights
Analytics plays a pivotal role in the success of OTT live streaming services. By collecting and analyzing user data, platforms can enhance viewer engagement, optimize content delivery, and drive business decisions.
- QoE Analytics: For live streaming, real-time quality of experience (QoE) insights are crucial to managing issues such as buffering, latency, or server overload. This is where companies like NPAW come in, providing both QoE Analytics for Video player and QoE Application Performance Monitoring.
- Personalization and Recommendations: By analyzing user preferences and viewing patterns, OTT platforms can offer personalized content recommendations. NPAW’s Product Analytics features an AI-powered recommendation engine, which analyzes vast amounts of data to suggest content, keeping users engaged.
- Engagement Metrics: Understanding viewer behavior is key to improving content strategies. Metrics such as watch time, churn rate, and peak concurrent viewers help platforms refine their offerings. For example, OTTs using NPAW Product Analytics can harness these insights to tailor its content lineup and engage fans more effectively.
- QoS Monitoring: Tools such as NPAW’s End-to-End monitoring and NPAW Probes solutions provide holistic Quality of Service (QoS) analytics and automated QA – from content ingest to end-user device. NPAW Device Probes, for example, are able to completely replicate, control and record end-user devices, making troubleshooting transparent and robust. These monitoring solutions let video service providers view every step along the video delivery chain via a series of monitoring points. This makes it easy to spot anomalies and resolve issues quickly.
Integrating Technologies for Seamless Live Streaming
The interplay of OTT platforms, analytics, and CDNs creates a robust ecosystem for live streaming. Here’s how these technologies come together:
- Live Event Preparation: Before a live event, the OTT platform ensures that content is encoded in multiple formats and resolutions, ready for adaptive streaming. Analytics tools predict viewership spikes, allowing CDNs to allocate resources accordingly.
- Real-Time Delivery: During the event, CDNs handle content delivery, while analytics tools monitor QoS metrics. The OTT platform’s ABR technology adapts streams to varying bandwidth conditions, ensuring uninterrupted playback.
- Post-Event Optimization: After the event, analytics data helps platforms understand audience engagement and identify areas for improvement. These insights feed back into the OTT platform’s content strategy and technical enhancements.
The OTT Tech Stack – The Future of Television
OTT live streaming is a dynamic and rapidly evolving space, driven by the integration of sophisticated technologies and mass adoption by global audiences. The emergence of AI and its various applications means we’re truly living in the future of entertainment.