Providing Reliable Video Performance Across the Board During the UEFA European Championship

After a year’s postponement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UEFA 2020 European Football Championship tournament (aka the Euros) ended up playing out over 4 weeks across June and July, culminating with the Italian national team defeating England in the championship match on July 11. As one of the most prestigious international football/soccer tournaments in the world – and one that fans had to wait an extra year to see – UEFA Euro 2020 unsurprisingly drew huge streaming audiences on OTT platforms from viewers across Europe and the rest of the world.

Any popular live event in which millions of people tune in at the same time runs the risk of attracting more traffic than anticipated. When this happens, it can create congestion on the networks and other delivery infrastructure that ultimately impacts the end-user experience for many of those viewers watching on their Smart TVs, web browsers, phones or tablets. And even if the video performance is unaffected, an expectedly large audience can trigger overage charges on your CDN bill if it hasn’t been adequately provisioned.

As it has in recent years, Lumen® Mesh Delivery played a key role in helping some of the largest European OTT broadcasters navigate these delivery challenges by re-distributing traffic from the CDN to a peer-to-peer network of user devices during the most popular games of the tournament. The purpose of this edge solution that works in tandem with the CDN is not only to increase delivery capacity through a mesh network that automatically scales to the size of the audience, but also to improve the quality of service as the traffic demands increase.

We saw this play out throughout the Euros, as traffic was offloaded onto the mesh network of user devices at a consistently high level regardless of the audience size. In every game streamed by this major European broadcaster, over 77% of the traffic was redistributed from the CDN, thereby reducing strain on the delivery architecture and helping to ensure reliability of the streams:

Data Source: Lumen Mesh Delivery portal

The performance improvements were also evident in the Quality of Service (QoS) stats that we saw during the different events. Smoother network performance tends to lead to significantly less rebuffering, as you see in the chart below. There was also close to a 50% reduction in track switching, which occurs when the bitrate changes within the video player. A lower rate of track switching means a more consistent and reliable video stream that maintains consistent quality throughout the viewing session.

Data Source: Lumen Mesh Delivery portal

Data Source: Lumen Mesh Delivery portal

To see this on a more granular level, let’s take a look at an individual game, specifically the France-Portugal match on June 23 that saw one of the highest audience levels of the tournament. For this broadcast, unlike traditional content delivery solutions that can show signs of strain when viewership is higher than expected, the Mesh peer-to-peer technology improved the quality of service as more viewers accessed the streaming content. You can see this in the chart below, where the rebuffering begins to drop as traffic levels rise and more viewers get re-distributed onto the mesh network, and remains consistently low at the time when the most viewers were watching the stream:

Source: Lumen Mesh Delivery dashboard

How Lumen Mesh Delivery Works

Mesh Delivery functions as an overlay solution that extends the network edge by essentially turning user devices into mini-edge servers. The software is installed into the video player via SDK, and uses the secure WebRTC protocol to share the video content with other eligible devices on the mesh network. This pool of devices is defined by parameters such as geography, ISP, device and network type.

When a new user starts a video session, the first video segments are retrieved from the CDN, and then subsequent segments are fetched from the most efficient source – either the CDN or one of the nearby devices in the mesh network. This approach keeps content at the far edge by decreasing the distance between viewers and content sources, thereby helping to improve performance and reliability of the stream. As viewership increases, so does the number of available peers, enabling more sharing between these peers and eliminating trips back to the CDN.

Source: Mesh Delivery Technical Brochure

The sharing parameters can also be adjusted to limit exchanges to within ISP networks. This ISP matching feature restricts the connected devices from sharing content outside of the ISP network to help ensure network integrity. Providers can keep traffic within their network while still taking advantage of the benefits of peer-to-peer delivery such as improved performance of video streaming content, increased network scale and capacity, and more predictable delivery costs.

During UEFA Euro 2020, we saw both broadcasters take full advantage of this feature, which restricted sharing to within the same ISP a rate consistently above 77%, meaning that at least 77% of the content sharing was done between devices within the same network. And looking deeper at the game with the highest traffic (France vs. Switzerland on June 28), we see even higher intra-ISP sharing rates, with all four major ISPs keeping over 84% of the peer-to-peer sharing within their networks.

Data Source: Lumen Mesh Delivery portal

A solution built for the new normal

While the European Championships are an example of a live event where the traffic spikes can be predicted based on a schedule that’s set months in advance, OTT platforms still have the ever-present challenge of trying to make monthly network provisioning plans in a world where breaking news or other large traffic events can arise at a moment’s notice.

One of the advantages of Lumen Mesh Delivery is that it’s tailor-made for this kind of environment, as it automatically scales up to meet the size of the audience demand without the need for new investment in CDN infrastructure or network capacity. This kind of flexibility provides huge relief to provisioning teams who no longer have to worry about last-minute capacity requests or overage charges on their monthly CDN bills.

To learn more about how Mesh Delivery or other solutions that help improve the performance, security, and reliability of your edge and web applications, reach out to content-delivery@lumen.com.

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