A recent webinar from IBC365 explored the collision between gaming, esports and television, and how advances in connected TV, streaming and VR pave the way for new forms of media consumption. Pay TV operators and broadcasters are increasingly wondering how gaming and esports might work within their existing businesses. Below, Content Everywhere exhibitors discuss how they are helping providers to meet the challenges, including ensuring low latency, managing high traffic loads, maintaining server stability, preventing cheating and cyber-attacks, and delivering a seamless and immersive user experience.
Growing business
Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, CEO of Appear, cites figures from Statista that predict there will be over 285 million frequent viewers of esports worldwide by the end of 2024, as well as some 291.6 million occasional viewers.
“Esports broadcasting walks a tightrope between three main challenges: keeping up with a booming industry, ensuring a flawless experience with zero lag, and doing it all without breaking the bank,” he says. “Esports broadcasters must handle a growing web of camera feeds and intricate productions. Even the smallest delays can disrupt gameplay and shatter the viewing experience. Profitability in this competitive space hinges on highly efficient and cost-effective solutions.”
Rick Young, SVP, head of global products at LTN, says that the competitive gaming industry is on an upward trajectory, and its long-term growth potential shows no signs of slowing.
“As companies launch new gaming offerings, they face new challenges and opportunities. For broadcasters, this provides the framework to offer seamless live esports experiences capitalising on low latency and ultra-high quality, while generating new revenue streams,” Young says. “These feeds will give media companies a digital-first medium that prioritises technological advancement and agility, pivoting with the demands of game creators, audiences, and players.”
Jakub Kruczkowski, strategic business manager at Spyrosoft BSG, cites ensuring low latency as one of the primary challenges here.
“Gamers require real-time responses, and any lag can significantly impact their experience and performance. To address this, companies implement edge computing, which brings data processing closer to the end users, reducing the time data takes to travel between devices and servers. Additionally, optimising network infrastructure through advanced routing techniques and prioritising gaming traffic helps minimise latency,” Kruczkowski says.
Solutions
Kruczkowski points out that popular games and events can generate massive traffic, leading to server overloads and potential downtime.
“This is managed by utilising scalable cloud infrastructure and content delivery networks (CDNs). Scalable cloud infrastructure allows companies to quickly increase their capacity to handle spikes in traffic without significant delays. CDNs distribute content across multiple servers worldwide, ensuring that users can access data from the nearest server, thus reducing load times and preventing bottlenecks,” he says.
Kruczkowski adds: “Maintaining server stability is critical for providing a reliable gaming experience. Companies invest in robust server architectures and regular maintenance schedules to ensure that servers can handle high demand without crashing.”
In Young’s view, the keys to success involve remote production workflows and harnessing rich data. “Live sports produce a significant quantity of data, and when leveraged correctly, those data points lead to relevant insights for players and audiences in real time. Graphics and streamlined workflows transform a standard production into a top-tier production,” he comments.
LTN itself collaborates with a game data platform that utilises its ability to manage high quality, low latency video streams side-by-side with critical data of all types to employ new video-based data solutions, which offer plug-and-play video tools. “The partnership has been a major success, and we aim to further innovate in esports data and video to enhance the viewing experience,” Young says.
Lina Arenas, a business developer at Agile Content, also notes that esports and egaming present unique technical challenges that demand constant innovative solutions. For its part, Agile Content says it addresses these needs with technologies designed to ensure high-quality, low-latency broadcasts, secure content delivery, and robust live event production capabilities.
“Achieving sub-second latency is essential for the interactive nature of gaming. Agile Content’s CDN takes advantage of new encoding techniques employed to reduce bitrates without compromising quality, ensuring smooth and rapid delivery. Our platform minimises latency by contributing to optimizations in the end-to-end video chain: live production, transcoding, processing, packaging, and player playout,” Arenas says.
In addition, Arenas highlights the need for scalability, with millions of concurrent players, while noting that “protecting against unauthorised access is vital.” She points to Agile Content’s partnership with GlobalDots for CDN as a Service (CDNaaS), to enable dynamic capacity scaling. “This solution efficiently handles client request demand spikes by scaling resources during peak times and scaling down during normal traffic,” she says.
Overall, Arenas says continuous innovation in content delivery, security, and scalability “is essential for improving egaming infrastructure. By addressing these challenges, the industry can ensure a reliable, high-quality experience, paving the way for further growth in esports.”
Jørgensen says many esports and gaming brands use Appear’s X Platform to solve the challenges of cost, scale and latency, including RIOT Games, which “uses our X Platform to support remote production from its ‘Project Stryker’ facility in Dublin, where we’ve supported its League of Legends and VALORANT tournaments among others.”
He says the X Platform helps providers to scale up depending on demand, “accommodating ever-increasing signal volumes”, and prioritises minimising latency through SRT streaming. He also cites power and cost efficiency as “other central elements to esports broadcast economics”.
Meanwhile, device management solutions provider Radix cites traffic peak in terms of device usage and calls to the sales and support teams as the challenges it sees with esports and gaming services.
According to Nadav Avni, chief marketing officer at Radix, his company helps with aspects such as app management, making sure that your “app is up to date and patched, there is no need for a complete OTA firmware update”, as well as device configuration and settings, remote support, monitoring and analysis (telemetry), and marketing.
Young’s LTN says the live esports and gaming landscape is entering a new era, and notes that gaming and esports tournaments and events “exist from small scale to global”.
He says LTN’s intelligent multicast network “delivers ultra-low latency and 99.999% reliability for remote production”, meaning that media companies “can rest assured their esports feeds will be delivered to the right destination at the right time.”
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