FIFA

Challenge

The FIFA World Cup™ is an international association football competition, taking place every four years since the inaugural tournament in 1930. First televised in 1954, it’s currently the most widely viewed and followed sporting event in the world, exceeding the Olympic Games. In 2010 there were 64 matches with 3,178,856 people in attendance. Several content providers around the globe were streaming the world-class experience including ESPN, Astro (Malaysia), CBC (Canada), CNTV (China), TV 2 (Norway) and Univision Interactive Media (U.S.).

Prior to 2010, the online video experience for an event of this magnitude was met with rebuffering and choppy video, causing fans to click away prematurely. To detour an identical fate for viewers during the 2010 World Cup™, Conviva’s patented technology was leveraged to watch every viewer in real-time, predict when an interruption was about to occur and take proactive steps to prevent an unacceptable user experience from happening.

Solution

During the FIFA World Cup™, Conviva powered the live and on-demand online video experience for several content providers globally including ESPN, Astro (Malaysia), CBC (Canada), CNTV (China), TV 2 (Norway) and Univision Interactive Media (U.S.).

To improve overall quality, FIFA implemented Conviva’s preemptive optimization solution, Precision, utilizing adaptive multi-bitrate and CDN stream switching. It detects, locates and resolves any possible failure before it impacts the viewer. Conviva utilized its viewer-centric metrics to forecast global and local Internet patterns for intelligent decisioning. The World Cup benefited from Insights, with real-time visibility into individual viewers across multiple devices, geographies and affiliates. Insights shows audience reach and engagement metrics, which helps editorial, research and marketing make intelligent decisions to improve engagement and economics.

Result

The World Cup marked the first time an online event secured a broadcast TV-level audience. Over the course of the 64 soccer matches, Conviva managed more than 200 million streams and reached more than 30 million unique viewers worldwide. In addition, Conviva managed three billion viewer minutes and, on the thirteenth day of the event, maintained 1.5 million peak concurrent viewers simultaneously.

In addition, Conviva helped AEG Digital Media stream the FIFA World Cup™Kick-Off Celebration Concert. Conviva partnered with AEG Digital Media to build an audience-instrumented online video player that ensured the best possible fan viewing experience through the use of Precision’s pre-emptive quality management technology.

"We have a reputation to maintain with our consumers, so we couldn’t risk the occurrence of poor online video while streaming the 2010 FIFA World Cup. With Conviva, our entire online audience was able to enjoy the best possible viewing experience during the matches without fail.”
-- Paul Dale, CTO Astro

"It was important to understand the experience our online audience had during the World Cup at any given point in time. By using Conviva, we were able to gain real-time, granular visibility into the entire video delivery ecosystem from encoders to streaming sources and could quickly identify and remediate issues as they happened.”
-- Rob Fullerton, Product Manager, Audio, Visual and CMS CBC.ca