At SFO we use content delivery network providers to provide the bandwidth and functionlaity for user access to view live streams.

This is the best solution as they can offer the sometimes high level of bandwidth required, at one point we have had over 3,000 live viewers on a single stream
When ParsTV started 10 years ago we used an Amazon Server running video streaming software. At the time we powered up the server a couple of hours before a live stream and then switched it off shortly after a game finished. This was to reduce costs.

However, since then a number of providers offer live streaming services.

5 years ago we moved to using Dacast.com as a service provider to tie in with other scottish clubs who used Dacast.

Recently we have evaluated Amazon MediaLive services and Vimeo, both content delivery providers.

Amazon MediaLive may well offer a great product but its overal complexity to setup and manage makes it far too complex for us to use. I could provide information on the practicalities of the service but feel that the overall use did not suit our needs. Hence this was discarded as a possible platform provider.

Our next investigation was using Vimeo. Vimeo state : Live streaming with Vimeo is easy.

Very quickly it became clear that using Vimeo to perform live streams was indeed very easy, on par with Dacast.

Both Vimeo and Dacast have a good admin system to allow streams to be setup and embedded on our website. Both have security of the embedded output at the heart ensuring people cannot re-stream matches.

We are now going to offer both Vimeo and Dacast as CDN output to ensure speedy recovery in case of a network failure.

On the 6th November 2021 we setup 3 live streams to utilise both outputs at the same time. This proved extremely worthwhile as one provider connection failed and it was simple to inform users to select the backup stream. The provider had a backup connection so it took a few minutes to get that resolved and get the original stream back up and running.

In future our guidelines will ensure that all streams have a backup and that any switchover will happen in a short as time as possible.