Are you a sports junkie looking for a way to stream live sporting events to your TV? Maybe you are trying to stream your kid’s baseball game to relatives across the country or maybe you are building a digital catalog of your best performances in high school or college. Whatever the case may be, in the past finding a way to stream live sports to a set top box was difficult if you were not technologically savvy.
Thankfully with advances in technology, streaming content to the world is no longer something achieved only by those with years of experience dealing with expensive cameras and complicated editing software. Today almost anyone can record live content and stream it to whomever they choose with relative ease.
The key to streaming live content online is to partner with a content delivery network jam packed with features, one of which allows you to stream your content to set top boxes from manufacturers like Roku. In this article we will briefly explain the importance of a content delivery network and also talk about how to stream live sports on Roku set top boxes.
What is a Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network is a group of servers that are distributed across a large number of data centers across the Internet. These servers are typically located in different geographical locations. The goal of a content delivery network or CDN is to serve content to end-users in the most efficient and quickest way possible.
Companies or individuals who have a large amount of multimedia content like videos and high-resolution images are often well served by using a CDN as opposed to hosting these files on a standard web server. Without a CDN, end-users can experience extremely slow load times, especially when certain content becomes popular. The typical Internet user is extremely impatient and will often leave a website that is slow to load. A study from Mozilla (the creators of the popular browser, Firefox) found that over 30% of Internet users begin to abandon slow sites between 1 and 5 seconds. This statistic shows the importance of a CDN to ensure that users will be able to access streaming content as quickly as possible.
Limitations of Certain Content Delivery Networks
While there are a large number of content delivery networks that will be more than happy to serve your content, the truth is that not all CDNs are equal in terms of their features. Some CDNs have certain limitations that can cause serious issues, especially as your video content becomes more popular.
• Bandwidth Throttling – When you are streaming live content over the Internet, throttling can become a major issue. Some content providers use throttling to slow down the speed in which users can download video content. This in turn will cause more buffering and lagging which will cause some of your users to look elsewhere for content.
• Advertisements in Videos – Another way that some of the free video content providers continue to exist is through paid advertising. These ads can appear alongside your video or even be embedded within your video. This can distract the user from your content and even lead them away to another video or site.
• Poor Analytics – Another limitation of some CDNs is the inability to provide detailed analytics of viewer behavior. These metrics are extremely important for content providers to determine which video content is working well and which content should be tweaked. Without these statistics, you are essentially guessing as to which content you should promote.
• Lack of Mobile Viewing Options – Another important feature to look for in a content provider is how well they handle mobile viewers. With more and more users accessing both static and video content from their phones, it is important that your content be available across a large number of devices including smartphones, tablets and set top boxes.
Let TikiLIVE Help You Stream Live Sports
TikiLIVE is a content provider that offers a wide variety of features that can make it easy to stream your content to users across all devices. Whether your users are accessing your content from a mobile phone, tablet, television or computer, TikiLIVE allows almost unlimited customization to ensure that your content is always seen regardless of device.
In the past, streaming sports required expensive equipment to accurately capture the fast paced action, but with the advances in video camera technology, affordable options are now available that can record live sporting events in high quality. When live streaming sporting events you have two main options when it comes to how you are going to record your video:
• Video Camera – Recording your live sporting events using a video camera will produce the most favorable results. You can record in HD if you would like, which can produce extremely high-resolution video that will be a joy to watch through TikiLIVE’s robust content delivery network.
• Smartphone – While TikiLIVE does offer an app for both Android and iOS phones that allow you to easily stream content from your mobile phone, this is not recommended for sporting events. Sports have too much action to be effectively captured through the small video camera on most smartphones. This method may be sufficient for a home video, but not if you are looking to stream your sporting events to others.
Combining the Power of TikiLIVE and Roku
One of TikiLIVE’s strengths is its ability to mesh extremely well with Roku devices. This allows you to easily stream live sports to users who want to view your content from the comfort of their living room. TikiLIVE allows you to create Roku channels that can show up on a users Roku menu screen alongside big players in the video content game such as Netflix and Hulu Plus. Stop selling yourself short when it comes to getting your content out to the masses. Utilize TikiLIVE and Roku to offer your users with a wide variety of options when it comes to viewing your sports content online.
For more information about the wide variety of features offered by TikiLIVE, give us a call today at 305-289-4557. We look forward to helping you stream your live sporting events to viewers around the world.
