GoT glitches show challenge in streaming high-viewership events

When the Game of Thrones series premiere aired in 2011, streaming services were still in their infancy. Now, as the HBO ratings juggernaut wraps up its final few episodes, it draws the kind of massive live audiences that are becoming increasingly rare in an over-the-top world. But as the technical problems and glitches experienced by some Canadians trying to keep up with the battle for the Iron Throne indicate, transferring high-viewership events from broadcast to streaming comes with a set of challenges that streaming services are going to have to learn to navigate. The final season of Game of Thrones has brought unprecedented audience numbers to BCE Inc.’s Crave, which only recently began making live and current-season episodes of HBO content available, in November 2018. The April 14 premiere set the record for the most single-day streams the OTT service ever experienced, Bell said in an April press release. The show also "helped drive the biggest spike in Crave direct-to-consumer subscriptions ever with a 1000% increase in the week leading up to the final season premiere, spiking to over 3000% on Sunday,” Bell said. But some of those customers -- intent on watching live or shortly after broadcast so as to avoid big plot twists being spoiled for them the next day -- reported problems. That included complaints about video quality, buffering, glitches in finding the episode and not being able to sign in, among others. “This past Sunday, a small number of users experienced issues that required them to attempt logging in several times before video playback could be started,” Bell spokesman Scott Henderson said in an emailed statement. “We have identified improvements that will be deployed in advance of Episode 5 to help mitigate this from reoccurring.” Henderson noted that concurrent viewing on the service on Sunday nights has been seven times higher than normal since the new season of Game of Thrones began. “We have been scaling and load testing our environment for months in preparation for increased GOT volume,” Henderson said. “We are constantly testing and assessing network performance. In the event of issues, we immediately troubleshoot and work to restore optimal performance as quickly as possible.” Henderson said the company met its target of 99.9 per cent for service availability “every Sunday since this season's premiere of GOT.” “Broadcast is very bandwidth-efficient. You have one stream going to potentially millions of viewers. The internet is essentially a different stream for each user,” Peter Miller, an independent broadcasting consultant, said in a phone interview. One way to to deal with this is to take the content closer to the user, by using content delivery networks, which cache the data along the way to the end user in order to ensure they can access content without issues. Camilo Meza, senior technology consultant at PwC, said another tactic to deal with a higher viewership is to make only lower-quality streams available, to ensure there is enough bandwidth in the CDNs to meet demand. The problems customers experienced in this case “are usually at the CDN level,” Meza said over the phone. “The issue with these CDNs is that they have a concurrency limit, a bandwidth limit, and they also are usually serving other services,” he said, noting one strategy to combat this is to use multiple CDNs. Issues like buffering or not being able to access the account could also be due to problems at the internet service provider level, he said, due to congestion or bandwidth issues as too many people try to stream at the same time. Miller said he calculated several years ago that if all of traditional TV viewing were moved online, the internet would not have enough capacity to handle it. He predicted at the time it would take another decade of growth for the internet to be able to accommodate all TV traffic. He also noted companies have to decide whether to upgrade a service so that it functions perfectly for a high number of viewers who are only there for one event. If most of a streaming service’s shows average a certain number of viewers, “it’s pretty hard to rationalize investing the money to ensure they can have more than an order of magnitude of that,” he said. “It may be a reasonable business decision on their side.” The problem is particularly acute with live-streaming, and especially live sports -- as sports streaming service Dazn found out when it ended up refunding customers who had experienced issues watching games. Meza said Game of Thrones “is a great example of a non-live event that is still consumed in a live-event-like fashion,” which means that companies can take measures to improve the experience that aren’t possible for a live event, such as caching content on the device you’re using, or providing content to CNDs “so that they have it readily available.” But when it comes to a real live event, like a sports game, those options aren’t available. “You have to be as real-time as possible so that the viewer is experiencing the game as it happens,” he said. One of the challenges of live-streaming sports is that the latency for the stream is going to be much higher than on broadcast. “It could easily happen that if you’re streaming a game and your neighbour is watching it on cable TV, he’ll probably celebrate the goal or basket way before you, and that can easily spoil your experience,” Meza explained. Reducing quality of streams can help with that, but that can also harm the customer experience, noted John Simcoe, lead at the media and telecom practice at PwC Canada. Another key side is understanding the customers and how they consume content. “If you are able to proactively and successfully understand what’s the level of quality of experience that your customer wants and considers satisfactory, and how many users are consuming your content, at which points of time in the day, that helps you prepare,” Meza said. Simcoe said PwC forecasts that when it comes to sports content, “a lot of these technological issues… that are right now constraining or restraining some of the capabilities for streaming” will be resolved in the next five years. That includes ISPs boosting capacity, and streaming services figuring out how to better rely on CDNs to avoid problems, Meza said. Whether companies can take measures to prepare and upgrade only for one high-viewership event or whether upgrades have to be permanent depends on “very specific cases for that streaming service,” he noted. “But one of the advantages of most of these services relying on cloud providers or cloud infrastructure is that they can scale on demand,” he said. So for example, in advance of something like the UEFA Champions League final, “they can have agreements with their CDN providers so they can scale for that point to allocate for higher capacity and concurrent users, and then just scale down after the event.” Simcoe said that will lead to “more and more sports being able to be streamed and being streamed,” and that will result in more personalized experiences, like being able to watch only plays by your favourite athletes. He said he doesn’t foresee a tipping point towards streaming in the near future. “We view it right now, at least in our forecast period of five years, as being very much a coexistence, and a very strong coexistence.” — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca

GoT glitches show challenge in streaming high-viewership events

Broadcast | May 10, 2019

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