Kris Kruger’s Post

Live Streaming in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities 📡 The recent Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight on Netflix was a groundbreaking event that attracted over 65 million viewers worldwide. 📈 However, as a spectator who was tuning in, it also highlighted a significant challenge for live streaming platforms: ensuring seamless, uninterrupted streaming experiences for millions of viewers tuning in simultaneously. Many users including myself experienced buffering, connection issues, and even outages during key moments. While it’s incredible to see the massive potential for live sports on streaming platforms, the technical hurdles are clear—particularly as more companies venture into broadcasting live events. With Netflix already planning to stream major events like NFL games and WWE, ensuring network reliability will be more crucial than ever. This is where Belden Inc. comes in. 🚀 At Belden, we specialize in connectivity solutions designed to optimize content delivery networks and enhance infrastructure scalability. By leveraging our cutting-edge technology, companies can overcome bandwidth bottlenecks, reduce latency, and deliver flawless experiences even during peak traffic. As demand continues to grow, having the right infrastructure in place is no longer just an option—it’s a necessity for any platform aiming to meet customer expectations and stay competitive. If your organization is exploring solutions to optimize your network resilience and scalability, let’s connect! Belden's expertise in connectivity can help ensure your network supports uninterrupted content and data, every time. 🔗 #livestreaming #connectivitysolutions #digitaltransformation #Belden #networkoptimization #streamingtechnology #broadcasting

Gracenote's Availability product offers invaluable data to help customers find streaming content. With the entertainment ecosystem constantly evolving, there's a massive opportunity to drive the next iteration of streaming. To reach its full potential, streaming must deliver better user experiences enabled by search and discovery of all content - #tv, #movies, and live #sports - wherever it's available. Gracenote's unmatched availability and program metadata make it uniquely positioned to help customers achieve success in streaming. The Availability product consists of three primary offerings: Streaming Sports Catalogs, Streaming Video Catalogs, and FAST and #streaming Channels. Together, they address consumer pain points, deliver improved user experiences, and drive better #monetization. Check out the link below to learn more about how Gracenote's Availability product can help you find the streaming content you're looking for. #availability #data #streaming #content #nielsen https://lnkd.in/e6j_XzU7

Lessons from Netflix’s Live Sports Streaming Challenges- I guess auto scaling is not there for live streaming. Like myself many people tuned into the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight, it marked Netflix’s foray into live sports streaming, but the event wasn’t without challenges. Technical issues like buffering and freezing disrupted the viewing experience for thousands, highlighting the complexities of scaling live broadcasts. As technology leaders, this serves as a reminder that even the most innovative platforms face hurdles when breaking into new domains. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the importance of robust infrastructure, proactive monitoring, and rapid response strategies in delivering seamless digital experiences. How do you think platforms can better prepare for the surge in demand during high-profile live events? Does anyone know what Netflix CDN architecture looks like? #TechLeadership #StreamingInnovation #LiveSports #JakePaul #MikeTyson #autoscaling #livestreaming #netflix

According to a recent article on Broadband TV News, Gracenote is on a mission to solve the "can't find something to watch" problem by combining metadata. Gracenote, a Nielsen company, is leveraging its vast database of TV and movie metadata to enhance content discovery. By consolidating various sources of metadata, Gracenote aims to provide viewers with more accurate and personalized recommendations, making it easier than ever to find the perfect show or movie to watch. With the streaming landscape growing more crowded by the day, personalized recommendations are becoming increasingly important for both viewers and content providers. By harnessing the power of metadata, Gracenote is helping to streamline the content discovery process and ensure that viewers spend less time searching and more time enjoying their favorite content. #Gracenote #Metadata #ContentDiscovery #Streaming #Entertainment #Recommendations #BroadbandTVNews

Gracenote, part of Nielsen, is set to transform user experience for TV providers through accurate SVOD and FAST content data. This initiative aims to optimise content discovery, a crucial issue considering Nielsen's report that 20% of viewers abandon viewing sessions if they can't find engaging content. The problem is exacerbated when shows move between providers, or when different episodes are available on different streaming services. A prime example is when 'Modern Family' moved from Sky to Disney+ in the UK. Trent Wheeler, Gracenote’s CPO, sees this as an opportunity to improve streaming by enhancing search and discovery procedures. To tackle the issue of fragmentation in the market, Gracenote has launched three Availability solutions: Streaming Sports Catalogs, FAST / Streaming Channels, and Streaming Video Catalogs, addressing the "where, when and how to watch" conundrums viewers face.

Live streaming sports or exclusive events is no easy feat. Every component of the delivery chain—from signal acquisition to encoders, transcoders, mid-tiers, and CDNs—must be perfectly optimized to ensure a seamless experience. Yesterday, Netflix faced unexpected challenges during a live event. Despite being a streaming giant with an army of engineers and years of expertise, live streaming remains inherently tricky. Unlike on-demand content, live events leave no room for error—you can’t retest, you can’t be unsure, and you absolutely can’t fail. There’s no “watch it later” option. At White Peaks Solutions, our media platform, KWIKmotion, has been battle-tested over the past decade. With our focus on live streaming and strategic partnerships with industry leaders, we’ve built a system that delivers consistently smooth and reliable streams. Over the last four years, we’ve achieved zero downtime across our network and never failed a client’s live event. We’re constantly innovating and introducing game-changing features to make live streaming even better. While no one can guarantee perfection, we promise to always do our best—and to keep your live events running without a hitch. #LiveStreaming #KWIKmotion #WhitePeaksSolutions #MediaTechnology #ZeroDowntime

Reiterating the value of sports content for streaming services (and all broadcasters). #sportsbiz #sportsbroadcasting #disney #streaming https://lnkd.in/eNSvZaXH

A disappointing night for Netflix with live streaming challenges. My colleague, Juan Martin's advice on how to prepare for live streaming to ensure a quality experience. The highlights: - Model out peak infrastructure needs and build redundancy where possible, e.g., multi-CDN strategy, auto-scaling resources - Design overlapping caching layers to push distribution towards the edge of the network and protect origin servers - Stress-test the platform ahead of high-concurrency events, mirroring your audience’s behavior and regional dispersion - Build fail-safes for authentication, authorization, and payment gateways to avoid bottlenecks during ramp up periods - Have trained specialists on-site and on-call to provide real time monitoring and proactive incident management

🥊 Live Streaming Knocks Out Netflix! 🥊 Last Friday, Netflix stepped into the ring of live sports streaming with the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight, but it wasn’t the knockout they hoped for. Instead, over 500,000 users delivered a different verdict: hashtag#Unwatchable and hashtag#NetflixCrash. Here’s the lesson: VOD isn’t live streaming. Real-time events demand real-time solutions—traffic spikes, encoding hurdles, and concurrency challenges don’t forgive. At Quickplay, we’ve built the playbook for live streaming success: ✅ Multi-CDN strategies for massive audiences ✅ Stress-testing for high-concurrency events ✅ Real-time monitoring to dodge the pitfalls 💡 Dive into what went wrong and how to get it right in our blog: https://lnkd.in/eX4qNa7j P.S. Heading to SportsPro Madrid next week? Join me on the Tech Stage (Nov 20, 12:25 PM) for insights on “Winning with the Right Architecture: D2C and Streaming in Sports.”

For all intents and purposes, this puts The Roku Channel (not to be confused with the Roku platform or the Roku device) in the traditional "Cable TV" aggregator mode: A nice cluster of Free channels and services, with premium upgrade services on top. When the sports services sort out their issues (you know, some time in 2032 . . . ) I would see The Roku Channel putting those as premium upgrade services as well.