LiveLike uses virtual reality to bring the fun of live sports to the comfort of your home

Although Virtual Reality (VR) was born out of the gaming industry, the up-and-coming technology has since expanded to a variety of markets; consumers can now watch movies, go on tours, and even view sporting events in new, immersive ways.

One of the companies on the forefront of this movement is LiveLike, a New York-based startup that has developed a broadcasting platform designed to enable global sports organizations to offer live VR experiences. For the consumer, this means that instead of sitting and watching a game or match on your phone or television, the entire stadium experience can be brought to their home.

Another benefit of watching via LiveLike is the ability to marry some of the better features from home viewing and live viewing. For example, the company’s platform showcases on-demand statistics and dashboards, something that is mostly associated with in-home viewing, while still allowing users to experience the game in an immersive, albeit augmented, stadium setting.

The live streaming of sports games comes with a tough set of technological challenges, however. As Saswat Panda, CTO of LiveLike puts it, “From a production and delivery standpoint, you can spend a month preparing for an event and then you have two hours to execute it and make sure it goes flawlessly. You miss one minute and you’ve basically violated your SLAs.” One tactic LiveLike employs to manage that risk is utilizing plenty of redundancy and monitoring. From the cameras to the CDN, LiveLike—whose backend is built on AWS using Django & Python—set up its systems to be able to detect when things go down and implement a backup plan when that happens.

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