3 Essentials for a High-Impact Live Stream Event

Live streaming events such as the Olympics have become a significant part of how audiences enjoy and experience concerts, sports, and more from wherever they are. Watching athletes from around the world compete in real-time is thrilling but presents challenges for the online broadcasting community. To ensure a smooth, secure, and robust streaming experience, careful planning and having the right tools are essential – not to mention lots and lots of bandwidth. 

Fastly has a long tradition of delivering live events at any scale. In this blog, we’ll explore the key aspects required to make online events a success, with a particular focus on online security, ensuring resilience, and using instant log files to promptly address any issues that may arise. Here are three things you should carefully consider as you plan your next online broadcast.

Best practices for live streaming events

1. Resiliency 

When it comes to live streaming, having backup systems in place is crucial to ensure smooth and uninterrupted content delivery. Incorporating a multi-CDN architecture can help minimize the impact of outages, Internet weather, and also ensure that your content reaches your audience through a network that is stronger and more resilient.

By utilizing multiple CDNs, you not only have a backup network that you can easily switch to but also use to distribute traffic, avoiding congestion points and potential failures. Redundancy should be built into every aspect of the live transmission process, from capture devices and encoders to players and origin servers. Content owners can even opt to send streams to two or more origin servers, ensuring that one can take over instantly should the other become overloaded or experience hardware issues.

However, simply relying on multiple CDNs is not sufficient. A true Multi-CDN approach should also include features such as determining cost-effective routing for content, real-time traffic switching based on cost or bandwidth, customizing traffic based on end users' devices or locations, and providing comprehensive and real-time visibility across CDNs.

As an example, Fastly Media Shield allows content providers to efficiently work with multiple content distribution networks for reliable content delivery, precise control, and origin offload. This system enables publishers to optimize their network usage, reduce traffic requirements, and incorporate features like request collapsing, which directly serves multiple requests for the same content at the edge. The result is a network that is more efficient and cost-effective while also keeping expensive build-outs and upgrades at bay.

The benefits of low-latency delivery, cost savings, efficient routing, and redundancy make Multi-CDN a necessity for any modern infrastructure handling streaming content or serving cloud applications.

2. Online Security

When delivering large-scale live events online, streamers face significant security challenges, especially from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Aiming to overwhelm servers with excessive traffic, bad actors seek to cause service disruption and take the broadcast offline. To address this risk, streamers should use DDoS protection solutions offered by CDNs, as their sheer size and ability to distribute the payload can easily absorb the largest attacks while filtering out malicious traffic. They are perfectly prepared to reduce or completely mitigate the impact of attacks.

Another critical security concern faced by online streamers is preventing unauthorized site mirroring, often aiming to mislead fans or redirect viewers while charging a smaller fee than the authorized broadcaster. Implementing Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) can help protect against this by filtering and monitoring HTTP requests and blocking suspicious activities. WAFs can also protect against other web vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting.

Furthermore, streamers can use watermarking and token-based authentication to ensure that content is accessed only by authorized users. To prevent unauthorized playback in specific regions, streamers can use VPN detection and geo-blocking techniques. This involves identifying and blocking IP addresses associated with VPN services and ensuring that content delivery is restricted based on the user's geographical location, complying with licensing agreements, and protecting content integrity.

While the last two cases are more relevant in situations where content is gated or restricted from playback in certain regions, online security should be prioritized and part of the planning process.

3. Actionable insight

Instant logs can easily be compared to an EKG of delivery, measuring and reporting on crucial information that can give timely, actionable insights. Real-time observability is crucial for reacting promptly when issues arise. To ensure a successful live stream, it's important to work with vendors, including CDNs, that provide instant access to logs across your infrastructure. Monitoring critical metrics in real-time is essential for quick resolution and uninterrupted streams.

While good data is invaluable, it’s just as important to be able to filter out unnecessary information–signal from noise, if you will. Today, digital delivery has an abundance of data available, and it’s important to decide in advance which data to focus on to quickly determine if action is needed. 

Different data sets provide different insights, and over time, you learn which metrics are most important for your specific business. For instance, should you prioritize time-to-first-byte, rebuffering events, error counts, or latency? Until you figure this out,  vendors can assist you in determining the most important metrics for the common cases. Once identified, you can set thresholds to receive notifications or alerts when certain limits are reached.

Do or do not - there is no try

Meticulous planning and the right tools are essential to addressing security and resilience challenges and ensuring the successful streaming of large-scale online events. Integrating a multi-CDN architecture is crucial for uninterrupted content delivery, providing backup systems, traffic distribution, real-time traffic switching, and cost-effective routing. Fastly Media Shield exemplifies the benefits of this approach by optimizing network usage and ensuring low-latency, reliable content delivery.

Robust online security measures are also paramount. DDoS protection prevents service disruptions, while WAFs protect against unauthorized site mirroring and other vulnerabilities. Watermarking, token-based authentication, VPN detection, and geo-blocking techniques safeguard content integrity and access.

Additionally, real-time observability and actionable insights are vital for promptly addressing issues during live streaming. Vendors that offer instant log access and critical metric monitoring help streamers resolve problems quickly. Effective data management and setting notification thresholds ensure a smooth streaming experience. Combining resilience, security, and real-time observability is key to delivering high-quality, large-scale live events to a global audience.

For more information on this topic, check out our essential checklist for preparing for live streaming events.