Kayo Sports scales live sports service with AWS media solutions

It’s hard to overstate the global popularity of live sports programming, and the Australian market, with its thriving slate of homegrown and international leagues, is a shining example. With its recently launched multi-sport streaming service, Kayo Sports offers Australia’s sports fans a massive selection of more than 50 live sports powered by FOX SPORTS Australia, ESPN,and beIN SPORTS.

Subscribers can stream Kayo’s library of live and on-demand sports on iOS and Android mobile devices, laptops and PCs, and on TVs with Telstra TV, Apple TV, and Chromecast Ultra apps. Events are available in 1080p HD and users can stream to as many as three events or games at the same time. SplitView functionality means viewers can watch up to four events or camera angles on one screen on selected devices. Kayo also offers a feature that lets viewers hide stats and scores so they can catch up on completed events without stumbling upon the final result.

Enabling Kayo’s dynamic audience experience is video infrastructure from AWS. Kayo uses AWS Elemental Live encoding on-premises to prepare live streams for the AWS Cloud, where AWS Elemental Media Services process, package, and deliver HLS and MPEG-DASH streams for distribution through the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN). The Kayo sports service lets users control the action with pause, rewind, and replay functionality delivered by AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and the workflow supports Kayo Key Moments, which lets viewers skip straight to highlights during on-demand viewing.

Performance, scale, and resiliency were key priorities for Kayo’s video infrastructure. AWS Elemental Media Services and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) scale automatically with demand, and MediaPackage manages resources across multiple AWS Availability Zones as it prepares and originates content for delivery to CloudFront. A data lake built on Amazon EC2 and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables analysis of live performance data to support continuous optimization, while on the front end of the service, AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions support serverless execution of sign-ups and user validation.

“Kayo provides a new way for Australians to experience sport,” said Thomas Kaurin, Director of Technology at Kayo Sports. “With over 30,000 hours of content and game-changing features, it’s critical we deliver the best possible experience to sports-loving Aussies. AWS helps Kayo do this through its fast pace of innovation, with constantly evolving tools that help us deliver a world class experience.”

To learn more about how AWS can help bring live sports to audiences worldwide, download the E-book, “Use the Cloud to Deliver Great Fan Experiences” or visit the live sports application page.