AWS Media Services Drives Keirin Live Video on WinTicket Online Service

Casual and ardent fans of Keirin, a Japanese motor-paced cycling sport, can spend countless hours voting for their favorite riders, catching up on match results, and reviewing upcoming race schedules using online-betting service WinTicket.

Working together with AbemaTV, a CyberAgent Group Internet TV station, WinTicket offers a “Keirin Channel” with 24/7 online voting, race information, odds, AI prediction functions, and live video of nationwide Keirin races. With cyclists clocking 60 – 70km per hour, low latency and the ability to clearly see each racer regardless of viewing device are pivotal to the WinTicket user experience. With this in mind, WinTicket recently shifted its video delivery workflow to the cloud, leaning on AWS Media Services to ensure the highest quality viewing experience for its audience.

WinTicket’s live video programming consists of race coverage aggregated from more than 40 bicycle racetracks throughout Japan. To stream this content live, footage from each racetrack is brought into the cloud from AmebaTV’s studio and run through AWS Elemental MediaLive for video processing into adaptive bitrate outputs. The content is then originated and packaged with HLS using AWS Elemental MediaPackage and then distributed using Amazon CloudFront.

“WinTicket audiences want to see race results immediately, so low latency is essential. AWS Media Services enable us to deliver content with 1.5 times lower latency than other services, giving us a strategic advantage,” shared Hiroaki Egashira, CATS Software Engineer, CyberAgent. “AWS has helped us build a live delivery system with redundancy and high availability without impacting volume development processes. We’ve also been able to reduce operational costs because we’re only charged on per-use basis, including serverless architecture, such as Amazon API Gateway with AWS Lambda, which we’ve adopted for delivery management.”