In the rapidly changing world of live sports streaming, staying ahead requires embracing advanced technology. Harmonic’s VOS®360 stands out as a transformative solution, revolutionizing live event workflows and setting new standards for quality, scalability and security. This article delves into the game-changing features of VOS360 that are revolutionizing live sports event workflows.
With a proven track record, advanced video quality, and robust security, VOS360 is driving the evolution of live sports streaming.
VOS360 has demonstrated tremendous success in streaming high-profile live sports events. Since 2021, it has been used to stream over 3,000 live events monthly, including the Beijing 2022 Olympic Games, the 56th Super Bowl, the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup and various NFL, NBA and Premier League games. Its ability to handle peak stream concurrency, witnessed by record-breaking numbers, highlights its reliability and scalability. In January 2024, VOS360 set a new industry benchmark by managing 16.3 million peak concurrent streams. Most recently, thousands of live sports events were streamed by Peacock powered by VOS360 during the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Video quality is paramount for sports fans and VOS360 delivers pristine quality. Powered by Harmonic's PURE codec technology, VOS360 features an Elite VQ Mode designed to optimize video quality for sports content. The platform’s EyeQ content-aware encoding achieves up to 50% bandwidth and storage savings without sacrificing quality.
Delivering top-tier video quality during the World Cup was essential for many customers for competitive reasons. Different markets, however, face unique challenges like high bandwidth costs or limited broadband infrastructure. This has led to a variety of configurations in VOS360 SaaS deployments. Some customers opted for 720p with bitrates between 3 and 3.7 Mbps, while others chose 1080p with bitrates ranging from 5 to 9 Mbps. Customers streaming all games in UHD selected max bitrates between 13 and 15 Mbps, providing an immersive experience with HDR colors and 5.1.4 Dolby Atmos Audio. Using the cloud for UHD live events is cost-effective, as transcoding costs are limited to the game's duration.
Security is critical for any streaming service, especially for premium live sports. VOS360 ensures both platform protection against cyber-attacks and content protection against piracy. The VOS360 Media platform is guarded by a dedicated team of security experts who leverage cutting-edge cloud cybersecurity technologies. Threats are continuously monitored and security patches are applied in real-time.
Content access is typically secured through DRM and tokens, but for sophisticated pirate attacks, VOS360 adds an extra layer of protection with watermarking and real-time CDN revocation. Unique watermarks are embedded in each stream, allowing the identification of content leaks. When a pirate stream is detected, the source can be quickly identified and the stream revoked in real-time, immediately cutting off the pirate user.
To maximize flexibility and efficiency, VOS360 introduces a new workflow approach that streamlines live event operations.
Harmonic’s VOS360 simplifies live event workflows and includes bundled features like Elite VQ compression mode, EyeQ for bandwidth savings, HDR support, extended DVR windows, low latency and SCTE-35 for ad insertion. The platform’s live ingest routing service and geo-redundant configurations ensure seamless streaming with no single point of failure, making it ideal for premium sports events.
Each feature can be flexibly applied on an event-by-event basis depending on audience size and other factors. For example, features like Elite compression mode, UHD encoding or watermarking with CDN revocation can be selectively enabled to optimize costs.
VOS360’s ingest function has been completely redesigned to enhance flexibility. The platform now features a live routing service (LRS) in the cloud, allowing video sources to be uplinked from XOS or CP9K encoders. Ingested sources are routed through LRS, enabling duplication and rerouting as needed to feed any VOS360 instance, monitoring device or third-party services used, for example, to automate sports highlights. This flexibility simplifies redundancy management and blue-green upgrades while ensuring high-quality source monitoring before transcoding. Deploying LRS closer to the source also reduces error rates and latency. Video sources from third-party encoders can also be uplinked to LRS using SRT or RTMP.
VOS360 ensures full end-to-end (E2E) resiliency from source input to final media output. Each LRS is divided into cloud source and cloud edge subprocesses with various levels of redundancy, eliminating any single point of failure. While LRS can accept third-party sources, XOS on-premises provides even better service through PTS alignment (using VITC in the SDI source). This alignment ensures seamless source failover at VOS360 ingest and enables synchronized geo-redundancy, providing unmatched reliability and performance.
VOS360’s architecture includes robust origin and multi-CDN configurations to ensure high availability and seamless failover. Geo-redundant instances can be deployed across different cloud regions or providers, synchronized to allow for uninterrupted streaming. This setup is crucial for handling premium live events with high reliability. Multi-CDN support further enhances this resiliency, as demonstrated during the record-breaking NFL exclusive game on Peacock, which utilized up to eight CDNs for maximum performance and reliability.
A significant feature recently introduced in VOS360 is origin pre-warming. This addresses the latency issues of regular cloud autoscaling, which can be too slow to handle sudden surges in user requests at the start of a live event. With origin pre-warming, additional origin nodes are pre-allocated ahead of anticipated high-traffic events, ensuring all user requests are served without delay. This proactive scaling is essential for maintaining seamless streaming during peak times, such as the beginning of a major sports event or the launch of a new VOD catalog. Customers can also run pre-warm configurations themselves without needing DevOps.
VOS360 automatically transitions from live to Live2VOD (replay) using the same URL, eliminating the need for additional CMS commands. Replay becomes immediately available after the end-time. This setup provides significant CDN and origin bandwidth savings, as the same segments are used for live and replay and are stored in the CDN cache.
Confidence monitoring is available to ensure source quality before start time and start/end times can be adjusted until the last second. This streamlined approach is ideal for live event services where all sources come from sports or public venues.
VOS360 simplifies the entire live event workflow, from creation to deactivation, boosting production efficiency. During the creation phase, operators configure the service, set up encoding profiles, and define the event timings - all without incurring costs since VOS360 doesn’t ingest or transcode video at this point. Activation occurs shortly before the event, allowing operators to monitor the video flow. The video becomes available to viewers automatically at the start time, and when the event ends, it transitions seamlessly to a live2VOD replay and VOS360 releases all resources.
Adopting VOS360 for live sports streaming represents a significant strategic shift for operators. Beyond a technological upgrade, it paves the way for enhanced viewer engagement, increased revenue and strengthened positions in the rapidly evolving streaming industry. As the demand for high-quality, scalable and secure live sports streaming grows, VOS360 stands out as the ideal solution for meeting these challenges head-on.
Explore the future of live sports streaming with confidence. Explore how Harmonic's VOS360 can elevate your media strategy and prepare you for the challenges of the digital era. Contact us today to learn more about our cutting-edge technology and its transformative impact on live sports streaming.