Case Study

AISportsWatch livestreaming sports at scale with Google Cloud

AISportsWatch

AISportsWatch aims to balance the scales between top clubs and amateur teams by providing an online platform for broadcasting the matches of smaller teams across a range of sports. The company has developed its own cutting-edge camera built with multiple lenses, arranged side by side, which provide full 180-degree coverage of a sports field at all times.

AISportsWatch then uses AI to automatically knit together the images from the lenses, identify where the main activity is, and focus the video feed there. The result is a seamless, edited, professional-looking live feed that ensures viewers never miss the action. Alongside this AISportsWatch has created a range of AI tools that collects data on everything that happens on the playing field, helping clubs refine their coaching strategies and pinpoint areas for training and improvement. 

Scenario

When AISportsWatch first launched in 2017, it covered a few dozen matches every weekend in its native Germany. Even then, an on-premises infrastructure didn’t have the capacity to broadcast livestreams without investing a huge amount into hardware, so the company built its initial platform on the cloud.

By mid-2018 however, AISportsWatch had increased both the number of matches and types of sports it was broadcasting, while working on higher quality cameras and improved AI that ingested and analyzed even more data. This required increasing amounts of resources and the existing cloud infrastructure started to prove unreliable, with unplanned outages coming at crucial times when demand was at its highest.

In one case, AISportsWatch had to resort to manual methods in order to deliver an unexpected 50,000 parallel accesses from football fans tuning in to watch their favourite team. 

Today the company partners with more than 2,000 clubs to livestream football, basketball, and, most recently, ice hockey matches in full 1080p HD.

To achieve such an all-encompassing platform at such scale, AISportsWatch turned to Google Cloud and chose Go Reply, Google Cloud Premier Partner, to help reshape the company’s architecture for a smooth switchover to the Google Cloud environment.

The challenge for us is to maintain a consistent level of quality across all our livestreams. As we grew bigger, we started to have problems with stability and outages. We needed a new infrastructure that could scale on demand without compromising our standards. For us, that was Google Cloud.

Marvin Baudewig
AISportsWatch

Solution

AISportsWatch looked for an alternative cloud platform and chose to trial some of its services with Google Cloud. After a few months AISportsWatch was ready to complete the migration and teamed up with Go Reply, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, who within one month helped reshape the company’s architecture for a smooth switchover to the Google Cloud environment.

Go Reply enabled the company to take advantage of the flexibility of Google Cloud to design an infrastructure that can adapt to the unique challenges of its work. For the livestreaming functionality, the vast majority of traffic is now handled with microservices orchestrated with Cloud Functions, while the stateful applications run on App Engine. Their AI tools now run on Compute Engine virtual machines, which can scale up or down as required. Meanwhile, Cloud Storage provides a secure, easily accessible way of storing the huge amount of streams that AISportsWatch has accumulated over the years.

AISportsWatch

AISportsWatch offers a cost efficient and fully automatic production, activation, and broadcasting service that delivers video content to fans of more than 2,000 sports clubs. AISportsWatch uses Cloud Functions and Compute Engine virtual machines to power its all-inclusive, AI-led sports broadcasting platform for fans of all kinds of sports.

Go Reply, part of the Reply Group, is a Google Cloud Premier Partner providing services in the following areas: cloud strategy and migration, cloud hosting, big data, machine learning, PCI/ISO compliance and security management, productivity services and fully managed 24 x 7 services to support your business-critical applications.