Women’s football is now hugely popular around the world. Audiences are keen to watch the big games live. Today, that means more than just traditional television broadcast: audiences expect to be able to watch on multiple screens and platforms. Owners of the intellectual property rights now recognise the pressure of its large viewership base to deliver quality content anytime, anywhere, on any device. The challenge is to deliver the content without compromising on quality and reliability.
The popularity of social media has introduced yet another platform for live event consumption, assuring wider audience reach and improved usability. However, operators are often faced with quality and integration challenges when using social media platform for live streams. To ensure streams are mobile-friendly, transmissions from a professional broadcast setup are compressed and re-formatted by the social media platforms, processing which can cause a delay of as much as 30 seconds.
For its coverage of the Women’s International Champions Cup (WICC) to audiences throughout mainland China, Relevent Sports Group adopted a revolutionary transmission architecture designed by Caton Technology. With 100% successful transmission, coverage of the WICC 2021 final was efficiently transported from BT Tower in London to Sina Weibo, the leading Chinese social media platform, quickly and securely. In utilising Caton Technology, the content was delivered in the lowest latency, resulting in exceptional coverage across the Sina Weibo platform, exceeding viewers expectations.
Bespoke architecture for WICC 2021 live broadcast on social media
To ensure that the Relevent Sports video streams were transmitted in a cost-effective, reliable and efficient manner, a bespoke video transmission architecture that assured maximum performance and reliability was designed by Caton, providing seamless integration between Relevent Sports’ existing infrastructure, Caton’s cutting-edge technologies, and Sina Weibo. This delivered three key benefits:
Premium experience: Meeting its promise to deliver the best viewing experience to its customers, Relevent Sports tapped on the extensive reach of CatonNet Video Platform (CVP), along with Caton Transport Protocols (CTP), to ensure that signals are transmitted in an optimised fashion from London to Hong Kong. Powered by CTP’s inbuilt algorithms that mitigate network challenges through dynamic error correction and optimisation of transmission links, transmissions through CVP are assured with high quality, performance, and reliability.
Simplified viewing over social media: As mobile viewing becomes the norm, social media platforms need to ensure that transmission bitrates are mobile device-friendly. To broadcast successfully through social media platforms such as Sina Weibo, IP owners and production companies need to move away from traditional broadcasting formats and protocols. The cutting-edge technologies from CVP allowed Relevent Sports to transcode seamlessly into the Sino Weibo format, delivering the live signal ready to go. The extensive protocol compatibility of CVP also ensured seamless interoperability, simplifying the broadcast integration process between Relevent Sports existing infrastructure and Sina Weibo.
Utmost security: Relevent Sports also placed high emphasis on security to prevent content piracy. CVP boasts a multi- layer security architecture where not only the transmission tunnels are AES-265 encrypted, streams and data are also individually sliced and encapsulated by CTP’s proprietary technologies. In addition, CVP also enables operations in a closed account system where control commands are encrypted and connections are whitelist gated.
About Relevent Sports
Relevent Sports Group (RSG) is one of the most influential privately-owned international soccer companies, with a focus on growing the popularity of the sport in North America and Asia. RSG delivers exceptional multi-platform experiences and access for fans across the International Champions Cup, Women’s International Champions Cup, and the International Champions Cup Futures tournaments featuring the world’s top soccer clubs. RSG also invests in and develops platforms to accelerate the growth of soccer, including the first-of- its-kind joint venture with LaLiga to grow the popularity and value of the league in North America.
Relevant Caton products:
1. Caton Media Bridge: Caton Media Bridge is a cost-effective, platform-based and multipurpose video processing system that can meet your needs for various video delivery applications. The device supports three functional modules for receiving, encoding and decoding, making it easy for you to adopt a video service or turn your existing service into an IP-based network to support multi-channel video processing.
With industry standard ASI and IP connections, the Caton Media Bridge can tap on Caton’s advanced technology ecosystem including Caton Transport Protocols (CTP) and CatonNet Video Platform (CVP), by connecting to other Caton suite of products.
2. Caton Transport Protocols (CTP): Seamlessly adapt to the challenges caused by jitter and network congestion, ensuring stability, high quality, low latency and security. CTP continues to be the chosen technology for business applications ranging from live coverage of world-class sports games to real-time telemedicine consultations. Beyond video, enterprises and service providers are leveraging CTP for fast file/data transfer, enjoying transfer speeds that are significantly faster than traditional solutions.
3. CatonNet Video Platform (CVP): Provides broadcast grade media transmission services with presence in over 60 countries worldwide. Powered by Caton Transport Protocols (CTP), CVP delivers a highly available, low latency and secure service ensuring your video can be transmitted and received without compromising on quality or speed.
