JioCinema which is a streaming platform run by Reliance Jio is now amongst the key streaming services in India. IPL (Indian Premier League) rights to stream were a big problem for JioCinema as it had to provide a live streaming facility for millions of users at the same time. To this end, this case study looks at real-world experience of JioCinema to understand how it dealt with IPL live streaming for large audience in terms of technical approach and infrastructure, and usability interventions.
Background
The IPL is arguably one of the biggest cricket leagues in the world and loves lots of viewership. Streaming such as big event requires strong support infrastructure and requirements of the technological support to provide the interruption-free broadcast of high quality. It was a chance for JioCinema to prove itself and to become even more established in the competition of streaming platforms.
Challenges
- High Traffic Volume: Handling millions of viewers for live match at the same time.
- Low Latency: Reducing the time between the live event and the stream to the minimum.
- High Definition Streaming: Delivering smooth video streams without interruption, lag or delay.
- Scalability: Sustaining the highly growing number of inquiries during match times, by quickly expanding our infrastructure.
- User Engagement: Maintaining the audience’s attention while offering interactivity and easy website browsing.
Technical Strategies and Solutions
- Robust Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Partnerships with Leading CDNs: JioCinema adopted few best CDN service providers for distribution of its contents at different geo locations.
- Edge Servers: Used edge servers to store data closer to the users, in order to minimize the load time.
- Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
- Dynamic Adjustment: Adopted the adaptive streaming technology to vary streaming quality according to the current connection pace, so that the videos will not stuck when the connection starts to buffer.
- Multiple Resolutions: Live streaming in different qualities (low, medium and high) to ensure reach out to different device users and network connectivity.
- Scalable Cloud Infrastructure
- Cloud Services: Utilized cloud services to support the basic infrastructure as flexible and with high elasticity. During the off-peak hours, JioCinema could set up the server capacity into a state of high readiness as they were able to do during IPL matches.
- Load Balancing: Put into practice more sophisticated methods to make the request load among the servers more balanced so none of them overloads.
- Low Latency Streaming Protocols
- WebRTC and HLS: Optimized streaming protocols for latency, WebRTC and HTTP live streaming to enable real-time viewing.
- Optimized Encoding: Optimized video encoding to enhance fast processing of live streams that is attractive to employers and thus efficient.
- Interactive Features and User Experience Enhancements
- Real-Time Stats and Commentary: Used live statistics inserts, analysis, and commentaries, as well as polls and quizzes to maintain active audience’s attention during the match.
- Multi-Angle Viewing: Provided options of replaying the match in multiple camera perspectives where the user has an opportunity to view the match in different directions at will.
- Seamless Navigation: Guaranteed simple navigation through the live matches, highlights, and related content on the website.
Results
- High User Engagement: JioCinema Chief Operating Officer said that there was increased usage to a record high during IPL matches where millions of people were viewing concurrently retaining the app in their devices.
- Positive User Feedback: Got a good response for the quality of the stream, low to no buffering, and engaging tools.
- Increased Subscriptions: Acquisition of a large number of new customer to the Jio network the used Cricket Season IPL to popularize the product.
- Scalability and Reliability: Clearly illustrated the tackling of high traffic volume and ensured JioCinema was ready for live sports streaming.
Conclusion
Success in streaming IPL for a high number of users along with most people frequently engaging in movie downloads, indicates that JioCinema has an efficient technical platform, effective partners, and customer-oriented strategy. Using sophisticated CDN technologies, ABR, elastic cloud environment, low-latency connection, and appealing interactivity, JioCinema provided users watching millions of adroit and pleasant cricket matches. This particular case highlighted the pressing role of the technological advances in ensuring efficacy of big live stream events and offers a yardstick of giant live stream events that will increasingly feature in the advancement of other digital streaming.
read more 7 Best Practices for Handling Large Amounts of Traffic and Data in Video Streaming Applications
