ITVX continues to grow as a platform and with owner ITV holding key broadcast rights, it’s vital for everything to run smoothly.
Not so Euro 2020, when ITV’s Mark Ison discovered what happens when things go bad, for England and the broadcaster.
“It was the 2020 Euros, which, due to this Covid thing, meant that tournament was in 2021. It was June or July. I forget the exact date, but I think it was Switzerland that we had. I might not remember. It might not be those two teams. We had about 500,000 viewers on our platform and at some point during that match, a corner kick was being taken and we started showing the nation that same six seconds of video for about 45 minutes, which was not a good story.”
These were the days of ITV Hub, the predecessor of ITVX, and the Daily Mail were first to the story.
“We had teams from Irdeto, our CDM partner, Akamai at the time, trying to figure out what had happened,” explained Ison to the Connected TV World Summit. “At that point I wasn’t responsible for the video. So I sort of just sit back and let the operational teams deal with. At that time I got more involved in the aftermath of trying to figure out what had actually happened.|
Ison said it was a lesson learnt. From that day ITV began to take the video part of its application “really, really seriously”. And subsequently transformed the way it does video.
The broadcaster went from a group of two people looking after the video assistants, to a team of 35, sometimes 40 people. It maintained its partnership with its streaming solutions provider Irdeto and began to rethink. Said Ison: “[We could have said], no, we’re done, we’re going to find another vendor. But that’s never the right answer in good partner relationships. And so, we got back together the right architects and the right experts from ITV and completely rethought how our live streaming platform was going to work to set us up for the future. And that was just ahead of where we were relaunching ITVX”
November came and a number of small fixes had been made to the streaming systems ahead of Love Island, another big streaming event for the broadcaster. By the following March Irdeto had replaced the complete live streaming set up, introducing separate packages for each channel and device type.
Ison explains that In the event of a failure it would only effect specific channels on specific devices.
Preparation for the World Cup began a year out with conversations with ISP partners Fastly, Akamai, and Cloudfront. During the Euros ITV shipped 26 terabytes of data per second across those three CDNs, but the anticipation is that for the World Cup a ceiling of 40 terabytes is needed. And England are in the semis.
The majority of viewers will arrive 15 minutes before kick-off.
“We will often have a number of calls running,” explains Ison. “So have someone dedicated to talking with Fastly and another dedicated to talking with Akamai. Funnily enough, the CDN partners don’t want to be on the same call as each other
“Some of the earlier matches I was in the main office. There was some excitement about what was happening on the football match. I didn’t really care what was happening on the screen.”
