NBC Sports

Challenge

Super Bowl XLVI, New York Giants Vs. New England Patriots, was the first ever to be live streamed. NBCSports.com was honored to host this major event. NBCSports is the sports division of the NBC television network, and it broadcasts a diverse array of programs, including the Olympic Games, the NFL, the NHL, Notre Dame football, the PGA Tour, and the Triple Crown, among others.

When a live event producer invests to broadcast a widely anticipated event, he needs to know what his viewers are experiencing in real time and how many people are watching each second. Given this was unprecedented, the first live-stream ever online, it was imperative NBCSports had experts monitoring the live stream to ensure the video was delivered without issues. They partnered with Conviva to ensure smooth video delivery.

Solution

Conviva’s live event support team monitored the Super Bowl to ensure there were no issues with online video delivery. Conviva’s Insights provided instant visibility with viewer engagement and Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics, with real-time monitoring and alerting. Conviva’s real-time alerts notify where in the delivery chain issues will occur allowing for timely, accurate adjustments to avoid buffering and start-failures. Conviva Benefits Multi-CDN performance monitoring—While the CDN support services on site could monitor its own performance, Conviva, as an independent third party, could see performance across all CDNs Instant, real-time analytics—During the live event, Conviva’s support services were aggregating data every 2 seconds to display the most up-to-date look into what viewers were experiencing and how the audience was engaging with content Localized alerting and diagnostics—Conviva monitored every aspect of the video delivery ecosystem and was able to detect what caused the delivery problem

Result

NBCSports was able to ensure that the first-ever live streaming Super Bowl event had a smooth delivery with minimal disruptions. Leveraging Conviva, NBCSports was able to fine-tune every component in the video delivery chain to improve the experience for each viewer. During Super Bowl XLVI, video start failures spiked, and an alert fired, notifying the team of an error. Using the diagnostic functionality of Pulse, the team was able to localize the error and isolate the root-cause, in real-time. The failure was as a result of two advertisements improperly assigned in the event manifest. NBCSports resolved the issue and prevented further loss of engagement.

"Conviva’s real-time view into our live stream allowed us to avoid massive viewer loss. Additionally, Insights provided deep intelligence into the demographics, reach and engagement for our landmark live-streamed Super Bowl event."
-- XXXXX, SVP NBCSports