Five Facts about live-streaming

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What is live-streaming and how significant is it as a means to deliver video to consumers?

Live-streaming is the act of streaming video content that is taking place in real time to an audience via an internet-connected device. In 2022 research media firm Omdia reported 219.7 million US households with SVOD and IPTV subscriptions has access to sports and currently this year 40 sport FAST channels provide live coverage. The US 2023 sports streaming landscape has reportedly invested US$19.5bn in sports rights, providing 60+ OTT offerings of live sports.

Omdia reported that three of the top sport broadcasting groups are streamers, including DAZN, Amazon and Apple TV+. With the transition from cable to streaming across a rising number of households, major sport events are becoming increasing available online. A key example of this is Prime Video’s offering of NFL’s Thursday Night Football (TNF). Nielsen recorded that TV viewership data for the first three TNF games on Amazon Prime Video in 2022 attracted a significantly larger audience at a total of 35.7 million views, than each of the seven Thursday games from the previous year that aired only on the NFL Network. In addition, the NFL Super Bowl final game earned 7 million streams on Fox and NFL apps, up from 6 million in the previous year.

Other recent global live sports have also attracted huge streaming audiences. On Discovery+ the Olympic Winter Games 2022 was streamed by more than 156 million users, with over one billion streaming minutes watched of the event. The FIFA World Cup 2022 which was live-streamed on UK’s AVOD platform ITVX, pulled in 146 million streams. This is more than 100m more than ITV Hub’s coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2018.

Similarly, FIFA’s Women’s World Cup 2023 also drew significant streaming numbers. NPAW found compared to the average of the 90 days prior to the tournament’s start, streaming was up by 20% during WWC game days. In addition, daily playtime for the average SVOD user during the WWC neared 59.7 minutes, an average of one hour of football viewing per day. The competition also picked up 3.9 million streams on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport Online.

World Rugby revealed its recently launched streaming platform, RugbyPass TV, drew a total of 3.3 million views and gained a total 1.7 million global users during its live broadcast of the Rugby World Cup 2023. India’s Disney+ Hotstar also hit a milestone of 59 million concurrent viewers during the ICC World Cup 2023 Finals.

Who are the major players in live-streaming of sports?

Among the major players in live -treaming are Amazon Prime, DAZN, ESPN+ and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Though Disney does not livestream sports directly via Disney+, it operates ESPN+, the streaming service of its sport entertainment brand — ESPN. The streamer showcases major sporting events such as the NHL games, Major league Soccer, La Liga, Bundesliga, MLB, UFC as well as selected NFL games, but also houses College football and college basketball games.

DAZN is home for international football competitions that vary from UEFA Champions League, Premier League, UEFA Europa League, Women’s Champion League, LaLiga, Ligue 1, Serie A, Saudi Pro League, Saudi Women’s Premier League, AFC champions league Bundesliga, Arkema D1, Serie A Femminile and more.

In Italy, DAZN has the rights to all Serie A games per season, with exclusive rights to 266 games. The sports hub also has rights to 175 LaLiga games per season out of a total of 380 in Spain. Meanwhile, in Germany DAZN has rights to 106 Bundesliga matches out of 380 per season. In addition, it also has rights to 121 out of 138 Champions League games.

DAZN is also notable for its coverage of boxing and combat fighting most popular in markets such as the US. The sports hub hosts events such as Matchroom Boxing, Golden Boy, PFL Archive, Ansgar Fighting League, Naciones MMA, Muay Thai for Life, Primetime Wrestling, KOK, MMA Bushido and Dream Boxing. It also is a key platform for its NFL coverage to markets outside of the US via its NFL Pass, with DAZN to rollout NFL Game Pass as a Primetime Channel in select market via YouTube.

Amazon made the move into the live sports steaming in 2017 buying rights to the NFL Thursday Night Games, streamed on Prime Video via its Thursday Night Football offering. In 2018 the media giant then acquired rights to the US Open and the Premier League. It has since expanded its live sports offering to include coverage of the Wimbledon Championships and other professional football leagues. In England, Amazon has the rights to 20 Premier League matches per season out of a total 200, with the company to have  first-pick of 17 Champions League matches for the 2024/2025 season. In France Prime Video is also the streaming home for French football competition Ligue 1 which Amazon has rights to 304 matches out of 380 in the region.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s entertainment hub discovery+ is among the leading providers for live-streaming major sport events. It was the streaming destination for the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 and will house the upcoming Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. The WBD-owned streamer is also renowned for its cycling converge such as Tour de France to La Vuelta a España. It also hosts top-league tennis events including the US Open and Australian Open.

WBD also plans to further expand its reach in the sports streaming market by adding a new sports tier to its streaming brand Max. WBD revealed in September the new offering will include live sports such as the MLB, NHL, NBA, NCAA Men’s March Madness, and US Soccer events.

Apple has recently followed suit, with the tech giant buying rights to the US-based Major League Soccer (MLS) this year. Apple TV’s MLS Season Pass provides access to all live MLS regular-season match, the entire Audi MLS Cup Playoffs, and Leagues Cup.

Increasing cord cutting has also pushed national broadcasters to invest in streaming sports that they hold the rights to. These include UK broadcaster ITV and Mena-based beIN sport. ITV provided coverage of the 2020 UEFA European Championships on its former streaming destination, ITV Hub, and then the 2023 FIFA World Cup on its relaunched streaming service ITVX. It has recently streamed the 2023 Rugby World Cup, Sail GP and Extreme E. BeIN’s roster of live sport events include top league football competitions, tennis tournaments, NBA games and cricket’s Indian Premier League.

What are technical challenges associated with live-streaming?

There are several requirements when it comes to delivering a high-quality experience when live-streaming. This includes a steady and reliable internet connection, the necessary equipment for production and the appropriate software to stream content.

Once this is achieved, other challenges might have an impact on the performance of a livestream such as high latency. This is most clear when there is a delay from when a goal is scored during a football match to the delivery of the actual moment on broadcast.

Another difficulty during live-streaming is having a network that can scale audiences, in particular for major sport eventsthat can attract a huge number of viewers all at the same time, with the audience also fluctuating at different times due to sudden surges of demand. When it comes to picture quality a factor streaming operators also must consider is the bandwidth requirements for video delivery, which can become costly, with excess bandwidth headroom often required to achieve high quality video delivery.

What solutions are available to meet these challenges?

There a number of technology companies have made efforts to tackle these various challenges faced by live streaming service, including the likes of Broadpeak, Harmonic, Synamedia and MainStreaming. Broadpeak offers a turnkey CDN solution that is deployed and distributed across the network to deliver content close to the subscribers. Broadpeak is increasingly working together with OTT streaming providers to leverage the CDN solution, designed to bring low latency and QoE to end-users. Additionally, the Multicast Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) solution launched by Broadpeak in 2020 facilitates ABR video delivery via multicast, removing any bandwidth limitation that large audience content usually triggers, in particular live sports events.

Meanwhile, Synamedia’s Smart Rate Control is designed to minimise bandwidth and storage costs while providing consistently high video quality and without impacting the encoding computional complexity. It uses variable bitrate (rather than constant bit rate) to match bandwidth to frame-by-frame image complexity.

Harmonic provides Content Aware Encoding (CAE) which is deployed to enhance streaming quality and reduce bandwidth consumption as well as costs. The technology leverages AI-based algorithms that adapt to the human visual system (HVS) and as a result, to deliver a better viewing experience at low bitrates, according to Harmonic. The product delivers its bandwidth savings using a standard AVC codec and with no requirement to upgrade client devices while achieving savings, reducing buffering, and overall CDN and storage costs, according to the company. The MPEG Common Media Application Format (CMAF) supported by Harmonic is another tool to solve latency issues. The solution enables live OTT content to be delivered using microchunks of about 100ms, which cuts down the delay of an OTT distribution to as low as 5 seconds, the company claims.

What is the future of live streaming?

We have seen a rise of live-streaming of major events such as the World Cup and the Olympics, and with more streaming operators moving into the sport rights market this is on the way to becoming the standard.

Omdia predicts, for example, that Amazon’s future sports acquisitions are likely to build on its existing distribution of NFL, soccer, and tennis, for which it has shown a willingness to renew deals and build on the growing audience awareness of Prime Video’s live sports offerings. Omdia predicts that although Amazon has yet to challenge other bidders for the largest rights packages, its acquisitions are slowly becoming more significant and expensive, with it likely to become more active in the Indian and Japanese live sports markets, where the impact of offering live sports through Prime would be significant. It also suggests with the overlap of DAZN and Amazon’s key markets some form of cooperation between them would enhance their rights bidding power and scale up their audiences in these markets.

Cable TV remains strong in the sports genre, being an important distribution channel for the likes of ESPN, according to data gathered by Nielsen, which found sports viewership via cable saw a 25.5% increase during September 2023. Nonetheless, with the launch of ESPN+, the sport broadcaster recognises the growing significance of the streaming market. In a recent investor call Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger revealed the company’s plans to combine Disney+, Hulu and ESPN in the future. He explained ESPN transitioning into a direct-to-consumer streaming product was “inevitable” but said it would be available as both part of a bundle and a “true a la carte basis in DTC form”.