This article is written by Charlie Kraus, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Limelight Networks.
“For the first time, but certainly not the last, I began to believe that Arsenal’s moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own”
― Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch
“Not, not … Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it’s my last. Not the game … not the game.”
–Philadelphia 76ers great Alan Iverson, 2001 press conference
Sports fan.
People may forget that “fan” is short for “fanatic” (“a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal”). And no matter the sport, whether it’s the football of Hornby’s beloved Gunners of Arsenal or American football, baseball or basketball – for the true fan, like Iverson’s rant, sports fandom is not just the game. It’s much, much more.
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With ubiquitous connectivity, true sports fans demand instant access to everything about their favorite teams and leagues. We’ve just passed the NBA and NHL trade deadlines, Selection Sunday is just a few short weeks away for the NCAA basketball tournament, and most baseball diehards know the non-waiver trade deadline is August 1 (usually July 31, but that falls on a Sunday this year). Transfer windows—the ability for teams to transfer players from other countries and leagues onto their teams—happen throughout the year in soccer.
What is the common theme here? A hunger for information. And the common frustration? When that information can’t easily be found—when a website responds slowly, or a video doesn’t load. In our most recent “State of the Online Experience” research report, Limelight Networks found that less than half, 41 percent of web users, are willing to wait more than five seconds for a website to load.
But what happens when a quarter-million visitors hit your site at the same time? Let’s use Arsenal—one of the world’s most admired football squads—as an example. With a global fan base 100 million strong, the Gunners pride themselves on being at the vanguard of technology—from being the first English League match to be broadcast on the radio to providing a comprehensive repository for supporters on arsenal.com. To add to the challenge, they need to be ready, without notice, for spikes in traffic that occur during the football transfer window or when fans seek to confirm rumors. Quick spikes in site traffic also occur when fans look for information about who is playing that day or for live match commentary, match results, or post-match reports. Often without warning, up to 250,000 unique visitors must be served within a small window of time.
The answer? As far as technology goes, it’s not sexy—but it’s absolutely critical. A powerful content delivery network (CDN)—a globally-distributed network of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers connected by private fiber links to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. With apologies to former Sen. Ted Stevens, it’s the “series of tubes” that gets information to your biggest fans when they want it—which is NOW.
“If you haven’t got a CDN that protects you from traffic spikes that come at you like a big tsunami wave, you will find that you will have outages,” says John Dollin, senior systems and operations manager, Arsenal Broadband Ltd. (Full disclosure: Arsenal is a Limelight Networks customer.) These waves of interest also affect sports news sites. ESPN.com hit 95 million unique viewers last October; numerous sites reported peak traffic at the start of last year’s NFL Free Agent signings last March as well as league sites, particularly as they add more live streaming. As another example, the NFL’s online-only broadcast of a mediocre Bills-Jaguars tilt still managed to draw 15 million people.
So while online video still isn’t the platform-of-choice to watch live sports, it’s not too far off. Until then, teams, league sites and news organizations will continue to build out their infrastructure to ensure that fans—from the casual to the rabid—get the information they want, when they want it.
Charlie Kraus can be reached at ckraus@llnw.com; you can follow him on LinkedIn here.