Getting ready to livestream the FIFA World Cup

INTRODUCTION

A Mediatech company for highly available content on-demand or in real-time

The FIFA World Cup has been bringing together soccer fans from across the world since 1930. While enthusiasm for the sport gets bigger every year, the way in which fans watch matches has changed. Whilst thousands of fans attend in person, the rest of the world relies on live broadcasts or online streaming, and the company making that possible in Latin America is Mediastream.

Founded in 2008, Mediastream assists 150 companies across Latin America to monetize and broadcast audio-visual content via online video platforms (OVP), over-the-top (OTT) media services, its content distribution network (CDN), and its live signal distribution system. The company makes content available on-demand or streams live broadcasts to hundreds of thousands of consumers, while managing advertising to help customers earn more from their digital assets, positioning itself as the go to mediatech company in the region.

Since day one, MongoDB has been a vital component of Mediastream’s architecture, providing the speed, scalability, and resilience to make sure consumers have a seamless experience even during peak viewing times. And as Mediastream prepares for the FIFA World Cup, MongoDB Atlas is giving the mediatech company the confidence that millions of soccer fans will be able to watch matches concurrently in real time without a hitch.

THE CHALLENGE

Supporting millions of concurrent viewers

Mediastream enables more than 150 million media reproductions per day. To enjoy a seamless viewing experience, the company needs to ensure that metadata is accurate and accessible – including the title, thumbnail image, and description of the content – and that viewers can easily search for content. It also needs to manage the log-in credentials for 30 million users, each with their own unique ID, password, and permissions.

“We needed an enterprise-level cloud solution to support our vision of becoming the number one streaming service in Latin America and to accommodate ten times as many consumers as we grow our business,” explains Francisco Vergara, Director of Operations and Partner at Mediastream.

“Our customers’ success is our success. We aim to grow together as partners, so it’s vital to be able to support their needs and adapt to changes in how media is consumed, such as live streaming for global events like the FIFA World Cup, or to be able to handle unexpected spikes in traffic during news bulletins.”

The company is also expanding into new markets, such as the United States and Europe, and needs to ensure its architecture has the flexibility to meet security and compliance regulations across different regions.

THE SOLUTION

A scalable, elastic, and secure environment

Mediastream implemented MongoDB on Amazon Web Services and migrated to MongoDB Atlas in 2018. “MongoDB has always been a great fit for our business. We were impressed by the new features that come with Atlas, such as the powerful search capability,” said Fernando Cheong, CTO at Mediastream. “We’re not tied to one cloud provider, so having a solution that supports multi-cloud gives us the agility to adapt our business in the future without losing a key component of our architecture.” Atlas supports multiple cloud providers across 70+ regions, allowing for seamless multi-cloud data distribution.

With the solution running in the background, Mediastream can provide seamless on-demand and live streaming services to customers in multiple regions. While the platform typically supports 200,000-300,000 concurrent consumers, it can scale up to handle 1 million, processing up to 10 million requests per minute with 99.995% availability.

To prepare for the FIFA World Cup, the team is running test simulations on MongoDB to ensure it can accommodate a huge surge in livestreaming demand. It has around eight customers in Latin America with the rights to broadcast the FIFA World Cup – from Chile, and Columbia to Mexico and Ecuador.

The team analyzed fixtures to see when the most important matches will be, and where the company will see the highest number of concurrent users as Latin American teams play each other. They then performed stress tests to load systems with the highest volumes of requests possible to identify issues and determine how much they need to scale to support those events.

“In the run up to the FIFA World Cup we’re testing our infrastructure to ensure we can handle huge surges in traffic and millions of concurrent users. Without high levels of scalability and elasticity, we wouldn’t be able to run our business. That’s what makes MongoDB such a good fit for us” explains Vergara.

With MongoDB Atlas, the modern, multi-cloud database platform, the team can simply add more nodes to its cluster and leverage autoscaling. As the platform regularly supports live news feeds for customers, Mediastream is confident that its environment can handle sudden spikes in demand such as those it’s seen during significant world events, which caused viewing figures to explode to 10 times their usual volume.

THE RESULTS

Uninterrupted viewing today, tomorrow, and in the future

Mediastream differentiates itself from competitors by providing everything a broadcaster or content provider needs to monetize digital assets in one place. Customers don’t need to switch between interfaces or contact multiple providers if they run into an issue, and they can expect fast, personable responses if they need support.

Its customer-focused mindset also includes helping them to open new revenue streams and get the most from products and services – an ethos reflected in its relationship with MongoDB. As the company expands into the United States and Europe, it has a high-quality platform supported by the best possible database. Consumers enjoy reliable access to on-demand or live content, can navigate easily, and MongoDB ensures data is stored securely in line with regional regulations.

“MongoDB makes life easier for our developers, this means they can focus on more satisfying tasks. It’s easy to use, has great features, and we can get support quickly when needed,” comments Cheong. “It’s also a platform that works well and is an integral part of our infrastructure, which gives us the confidence that we can scale and explore new markets.”

In addition to expanding geographically, Mediastream is branching out into the education and ecommerce sectors. MongoDB fetches all the relevant data for users to securely log-in and access online training, and enriches the online shopping experience by providing the metadata for inventory listings.

It also sends metadata to the company’s big data platform, which is used for consumer behavior analysis to help customers develop profiles on their users so they can optimize services and ultimately give them the best possible customer experience.

As for the FIFA World Cup, the team is primed and ready to keep millions of soccer fans engaged in the game with seamless live streaming across multiple platforms and locations.