The live stream on the Fox site went down briefly late in the game, sending Twitter into a tizzy. Fox's tech staff recognized the problem and said it had been solved, but some users still said they were unable to flow the game.It's uncertain the reason behind the glitch. Last year, CBS reported that an average of 1.4 million consumers streamed the Super Bowl to their site per minute, up from 800,000 the year before on NBC's website.
"We're investigating the issue," a Fox Sports spokesperson told Deadline.It's fair to say Devin Poolman is under a little stress these days, and it will not let up until following Monday.
foxsportsgosuperbowlCBS streamed to 3.96 million unique viewers in 2016. He is not giving either amount out, but it's up to him to ensure that the system's streaming operations run smoothly. That is partly why Fox will stream the game without pay-TV authentication requirements.
"There's a little bit of tradition there to go unauthenticated and a belief that the Super Bowl is an event for many NFL fans," he explains. "We certainly believe in helping the Super Bowl reach the largest audience possible." However, with special events like this, where scalability and reliability are critical, Fox doesn't need to take chances with something that can cause issues -- which authentication has done in the past.
Fox's streaming workflow starts with its air feed, which the online team pulls in with built-in redundancy. It encodes a mezzanine file in home, then transmits that via dedicated fiber -- also with built-in redundancy -- to MLBAM, which will provide backend services and final encoding.
The top resolution that Poolman's staff will receive out of broadcast is 720p, therefore there will be no 4K or even 1080p streaming this year. MLBAM will create six renditions of adaptive-bitrate HLS streams. The top rendition is 720p at 60 fps, but that will likely be withheld and used only if there aren't any traffic issues.
The highest rendition Poolman plans to use is 720p at 30 fps. During the game, he will keep an eye on quality, relying partially on third-party partner Conviva to identify congestion or other performance issues. If need be, he will remove the top rendition to lessen the network weight.
"We're going to be looking in particular at the renditions we've got in service, the different profiles which we are delivering to clients," he says. "We are going to be looking at the performance around CDNs to see if any particular CDN is getting overly stressed. We are going to be following things like rebuffering speed and flow start time and mistakes. It can assist us as we continue to handle the split between CDNs in real time."