Streaming 8–10 Hours of Professional Disc Golf Competition per Event Day Using AWS with DGPT

Founded in 2016, DGPT is the world’s leading professional disc golf tour, providing professional players with opportunities to compete in elite tournaments worldwide. It is also the Official Pro Tour of the Professional Disc Golf Association, the governing body for the sport.

Since 2020, DGPT has streamed its tournaments through its own subscriber network—the Disc Golf Network. Broadcasting these tournaments can be challenging because many venues are in remote areas with limited network connectivity, which might lead to service outages. DGPT worked with an online broadcast partner and had a physical control room to stream content. In 2021, it migrated the control room to the cloud on AWS to help stabilize live streams.

When the substantial growth of the DGPT began outpacing the development timelines and capabilities of its previous over-the-top provider, the company needed to explore new options. “Many feature requests to our partner went unanswered, and timelines were pushed back,” says Jeff Spring, CEO and tour director at DGPT. One of the unavailable features was pausing or rewinding live streams; another was making recordings of live events available instantly instead of 2–4 hours after the event. Broadcast quality was a concern too. DGPT recorded videos at 60 frames per second—the ideal speed to capture the gameplay—but the legacy partner’s settings forced a down conversion of the stream to 30 frames per second.

Server outages at the partner’s end further impacted the viewer experience. “We had moments when the servers crashed at the final hole because of spikes in traffic,” says Jeffrey Tocci, director of broadcast technology at DGPT. Brand value suffered when video outages occurred at key moments with high viewership. DGPT didn’t have protection of digital rights management either, which meant that its copyrighted footage was not secure against piracy.

The technical limitations hampered the marketing and revenue-earning potential of live feeds too. “Our inability to pause and rewind the feed made it difficult to run a live social media strategy,” says Zachary Kuykendall, marketing director at DGPT. The organization had to set up a redundancy stream for capturing clips and videos of highlights, lowlights, player performance, and other happenings in the field for its social media profiles. “It was not only the user experience; our marketing efforts were hamstrung by the lack of features as well,” says Kuykendall.

After research and consultations, the organization migrated its content delivery to AWS. Time was short—DGPT’s contract with the legacy provider ended in September 2023, and it needed the solution to be live by February 2024, the beginning of the season. DGPT engaged Insys Video Technologies (Insys), an AWS Partner, and participated in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a program for accelerating cloud migration and modernization journey. Despite challenges, the migration was completed in time for the 2024 season.

The migrated Disc Golf Network uses the following services: Amazon CloudFront, which securely delivers content with low latency and high transfer speeds; AWS Elemental MediaLive, which encodes live video for broadcast and streaming to almost any device; and AWS Elemental MediaPackage, which prepares and protects video for internet delivery and supports a range of digital rights management providers.

Live streams are also connected to AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video transcoding service, so that recordings can be available as soon as the event ends. Subscribers can pause and rewind live streams during the event or watch the recorded content whenever they want through a rich video-on-demand library.

The Disc Golf Network has streamed more than 30 events—up to 8–10 hours of high-quality live streams every event day—with virtually no outages despite local internet challenges.

DGPT uses the new features to enhance security, reliability, and viewer experience. For example, it now offers more customized services to viewers through membership tiers. “We could have only a single membership tier in 2023 because of technical limitations, but now we provide varying levels of access and special features through our basic, standard, and pro subscription tiers,” says Tocci.

Using the new solution, DGPT has also strengthened its marketing efforts. The organization is looking at server-side ad insertion into its live feed, which helps customize ads according to region. This addition will also help DGPT partner with companies that are not directly related to disc golf but interested in its audience-reach potential.