Limelight Networks Aims To Help Sports Broadcasters Securely Manage, Deliver Content Anywhere on Any Device

The Sports Video Group is pleased to welcome Limelight Networks as a corporate sponsor. A global leader in digital-content delivery, Limelight Networks is dedicated to helping customers securely manage and deliver digital content anywhere, on any device, with exceptional quality. The company owns and operates one of the world’s largest private networks with more than 80 points of presence (POPs) in more than 40 metropolitan locations providing more than 33 Tbps of global egress capacity to support the world’s largest live and on-demand sports productions.

“Sports broadcasting is traditionally at the forefront of media-technology advancement, with high-profile sports events being the first programming to use new capabilities,” says VP of Marketing Nigel Burmeister. “Sports rightsholders are increasingly introducing new online viewing options and capabilities to increase viewer engagement and bring fans closer to the game.”

Limelight’s ongoing investment in development and optimization of every component of its content-delivery platform enables delivery of high-quality performance and cache-hit efficiency, which means greater origin offload, better performance, and lower bandwidth costs for Limelight customers.

The Limelight Orchestrate Platform is built on a global, private backbone network and integrates content delivery, video management, web acceleration, origin storage, cloud security, edge computing, and support services. This combination of global private infrastructure, advanced software, and expert services enables today’s and tomorrow’s largest live and on-demand sports workflows and puts audience experience first.

As viewers increasingly cut the cord and go online to access live and on-demand sports programming, they expect a high-quality online viewing experience with no rebuffering. In addition, with so many people using a second screen to interact with social media while watching their favorite team online, delays between the live broadcast and the online stream create challenges: online viewers may learn of important plays and scores on social media before viewing them. The final barrier to full adoption of online streaming for major live sports productions is the ability to stream in real time, so that online viewers experience the event at the same time as those watching on traditional broadcast.

Limelight is focused on constantly innovating and expanding its capacity to eliminate these concerns so that rightsholders, broadcasters, and teams can consistently deliver great online viewing experiences on any connected device around the globe. At NAB 2018, the company showed off its new WebRTC-based sub-second–latency live-streaming solution. Games and matches can be live-streamed from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world with less than one second of latency — all with the high quality and scalability that the company’s customers have come to expect. Limelight is committed to helping deliver the largest live and on-demand sports events at broadcast quality to virtually any device anywhere.

“We look forward to working with Sports Video Group to learn from its growing community of sports-video professionals,” says Burmeister. “We’re poised and ready to deliver the video and audio streaming for new interactive sports experiences that bring viewers front row and center.”