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Live sports have become one of the defining tests for streaming infrastructure, and the upcoming FIFA World Cup is set to raise the stakes even higher.

In the complex world of live sports streaming, there are many points where hiccups can be encountered. In a newly published Sports Business Journal article, “Breaking new ground: The high-stakes challenges of live sports streaming at scale,” Netskrt’s VP of Product Strategy, Steve Miller-Jones lays out a framework for understanding how livestreamed events make their way from the field and onto people’s screens—and where they might get hung up along the way.

Whether you are a content provider or an Internet Service Provider (ISP), live streaming events likely cause some heartburn. Why? Bandwidth and quality. As bandwidth becomes constrained, viewing quality often degrades for subscribers. Unfortunately, bandwidth constraint is both an inherent function of the network and a natural result of streaming itself.

Whether you are a content provider or an Internet Service Provider (ISP), live streaming events likely cause some heartburn. Why? Bandwidth and quality. As bandwidth becomes constrained, viewing quality often degrades for subscribers. Unfortunately, bandwidth constraint is both an inherent function of the network and a natural result of streaming itself.

Due to their distance from major CDNs, last mile ISP networks are often peered, or interconnected, with ISPs further up the delivery chain (e.g. multiple hops away). As a result, delivering consistent, high-quality content to last mile subscribers can be a challenge, especially for live streaming.