With this year’s FIFA World Cup, streaming is a much bigger player than in the past, and with that comes new issues and increased outages, especially during peak times.
In Canada, people can stream the World Cup via TSN, CTV, Crave, and more, both via traditional broadcast and via streaming. Bell Media reported a 70 per cent increase in streaming audiences compared to Canada’s World Cup opener in 2022.
Ookla, the company behind Speedtest and Downdetector, has been monitoring the performance of various streaming services across the U.S. and Canada to see how they perform under World Cup strain. It used data on reports and outages gathered from Downdetector, where it found that problems spiked in short windows that aren’t always captured in monthly averages.
For example, Ookla noted Canada’s two broader sports streaming services (TSN and Sportsnet) generated 224 reports between June 11 and 18, averaging about 28 per day compared to 21 per day before the tournament. Meanwhile, American streaming services recorded 2,213 incident reports in total during the same period, which Ookla says is in line with their median day.
It’s important to note that a report doesn’t necessarily mean an outage and instead could mean login issues, site or app problems, or any number of other problems. Ookla says streaming introduced more failure points for viewers. Combined with large audiences arriving in bursts during sporting events, and it can cause major problems like outages.
Downdetector recorded 108 total outages, five of which impacted Canadian services and the rest hit U.S. streamers. The median incident lasted 23 minutes, 75 per cent of incidents were resolved within 45 minutes, and 95 per cent were resolved within 152 minutes.
While 23 minutes might not seem like a lot, when it comes to sports, 23 minutes is a lot of action to miss — especially in soccer. Viewers could miss a game-deciding goal, a red card, or a tournament-changing injury.
Across all recorded incidents between both the U.S. and Canada, Ookla says that 62 per cent began between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. local time, and 56 per cent began on weekends.
So, what should streamers do to prepare, especially as more sporting events move to that model? Ookla says “readiness has to cover player-level load testing, entitlement flows, multi-CDN steering, regional telemetry, app-start monitoring, device-specific playback, and rehearsed handoffs between vendors.” Getting it right could be the difference between everyone talking about that game-winning goal, or talking about how they missed it because a streaming platform went down.
Source: Ookla
Image Credit: Shutterstock
