Anvato Helps Fox Sports GO Score With Live Streaming of Super Bowl

FOX Sports’ live stream of Super Bowl XLVIII was the most-viewed live stream ever for a single sports event in the U.S. and Anvato, the integrated TV Everywhere platform provider for broadcasters and media companies, was a major tech partner of Fox Sports GO.

Over one million streams were viewed simultaneously on desktop and tablet devices without interruption. Ads different from the traditional TV ads were targeted to online viewers in the live stream.

To live stream football’s biggest event, the following breakthrough technologies from Anvato were utilized:

• Cloud-managed software encoding grid, providing maximum quality and high availability, and eliminating any need for proprietary hardware encoding.
• Anvato’s Universal Player that enables not only Apple iOS, but also desktop computers and Android devices to play the same Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) format; a simplification that yields an estimated fifty-percent reduction in distribution cost and complexity.
• Ad tracking and reporting to maximize the monetization of the streams utilizing Anvato’s integrated TV Everywhere platform.

“We are honored to partner with Fox Sports GO to help bring this iconic sporting event to so many online and mobile viewers. This was a great opportunity to validate the use of software encoding technology in conjunction with universal players across all screens to achieve the maximum flexibility and reliability,” said Alper Turgut, CEO of Anvato. “We look forward to helping other broadcasters leverage our new cloud-managed software to deliver the same level of quality and reliability in their live streams.”

Fox Sports partnered with Anvato to power its FOX Sports 1 and FOX Sports 2 TV Everywhere offerings last year, making them the preferred partner to stream Super Bowl XLVIII. Fox Sports GO requires its users to authenticate their device using account login information from a select group of service providers. The Super Bowl coverage, however, was offered free to all U.S.-based Internet users.

Anvato provides an integrated TV Everywhere platform for broadcasters and media companies, including live linear streaming, server-side ad replacement and targeted delivery of content and ads. Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Anvato’s unique hybrid-cloud architecture provides customers with the best of both worlds: low-cost, secure on-premise processing with scalable, flexible cloud infrastructures.