On Saturday the 1st of June 2024, System73 delivered the UEFA Champions League Final to viewers across the globe. Over the course of the ninety-minute match, watched by 400145 million fans, System73’s live content delivery solution, Edge Intelligence, was able to maintain 90% of our customer’s viewers on the highest bit rate for their device, ensuring maximum quality of experience (QoE). 

To add to this success, System73 was able to serve the majority of these viewers in traditionally hard-to-reach areas, such as Latin America, and specifically Peru, where CDN infrastructure is sparse, typically resulting in lower QoE, greater latency and higher delivery costs when using traditional content delivery strategies. 

System73 also delivered the UEFA Champions League Final without any prior planning or notice, and nonetheless, still achieved hugely successful results. This is promising feedback for future events that provide the time for greater planning and foresight, giving us a chance to tailor our strategy to predicted audience numbers and attain even better results.

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Image showing a one-second interval of traffic during the UEFA Champions League Final across Latin America, the Caribbean and North America. 

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Customer acquisition 

Our journey to delivering this global event began with an organic customer acquisition through our website. This customer, based in South America, initiated contact and expressed immediate interest in our solutions. Our Sales Manager was able to start the onboarding process right away, and ensured the smooth integration of our technology into the customer’s content delivery strategy. 

Within just a couple of weeks, our live content delivery solution, Edge Intelligence, was up and running, helping to deliver the customer’s content across Latin America and around the world. On Saturday the 1st of June, our team observed a significant traffic surge, which upon further inspection, correlated perfectly with the UEFA Champions League Final, first and second half. Our infrastructure is able to elastically scale horizontally to absorb such demand surges, as it was the case here.

Despite the lack of advance notice, Edge Intelligence demonstrated its ability to successfully manage traffic peaks of a major global sports event, underscoring the reliability and value of our solution.

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Increasing quality without impacting cost

When working with traditional CDNs, improving quality of experience for viewers of such high profile events involves a great deal of capacity planning in advance, including an increase in infrastructure to handle the spike in traffic, and by consequence, an increase in operational costs. This can be a challenging process for a lot of customers as they seek to acquire rights for the content and plan their content delivery strategy in advance. What is the best way to go from managing normal levels of traffic, to managing these sporadic but intense peaks in viewership, without increasing cost beyond affordable levels?

In delivering the UEFA Champions League Final, System73’s Edge Intelligence was able to scale content delivery to the capacity required by the customer, whilst maintaining quality of experience, without any prior planning or forewarning necessary. Not only that, we were also able to serve our customer and provide uninterrupted viewing and high QoE at a much cheaper rate than that typically charged by competitors. According to our estimation, System73 was able to save our customer an impressive 65% in operations costs, making our solution one of the most affordable on the market at a rate of $2 per TB for an infinitely scalable solution. 

This level of saving can prove critical for customers looking to deliver high-quality content in regions such as Latin America, where content delivery costs are generally higher due to infrastructural challenges. By contracting a much more cost-effective service, safe in the knowledge that even the most remotely located viewers will enjoy flawless content, our customers are able to allocate resources more strategically.

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Seamlessly overcoming potential challenges

Delivering a high-profile event like the UEFA Champions League Final in a region with limited infrastructure often poses significant challenges for traditional content providers. The primary audience for this event was concentrated mainly in Peru, a region known for its limited digital infrastructure, typically making delivering high-quality content a costly operation, which cannot guarantee reliable QoE. 

However, given that our solution relies on minimal support from CDNs, using them only as touchpoints, the bandwidth occupied by content delivered by System73 is significantly lower than that used by other strategies. Edge Intelligence, our live content delivery solution, leverages peer-to-peer connections between end user devices to create a centrally-orchestrated content delivery tree, therefore relinquishing our customers’ reliance on physical infrastructure and limited bandwidth. 

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Additionally, the Champions League demands high standards for content rights management and quality of experience (QoE), ensuring compliance with these stringent requirements while maintaining a seamless streaming experience added another layer of complexity to customers’ prior planning process. This was not a necessary concern for our customer in this case, as Edge Intelligence is an infinitely scalable system that adapts quickly and efficiently to sudden changes in traffic levels. As such, customers are able to request content rights safe in the knowledge that Edge Intelligence will effectively handle demand and maintain QoE. 

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Although the primary focus was on Peru, our service managed to attract a global audience, with viewers connecting from various parts of the world, highlighting the global capabilities of our solution. Additionally, our efficient handling of the event provided substantial cost savings for the customer, enabling them to allocate resources more strategically. This successful delivery underscores our ability to manage high-profile events with minimal pre-planning, reinforcing the reliability and efficiency of our service.

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A heat map showing viewers’ location during a one-second interval during the UEFA Champions League Final

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Opportunities for further success

Successfully delivering the UEFA Champions League Final underscores our ability to manage high-profile events with minimal pre-planning. Our proven cost-efficiency and high-quality service in delivering challenging regions like Latin America demonstrate the strength and reliability of our solution. By saving our customer 65% on delivery costs and maintaining high QoE even in hard-to-reach areas, Edge Intelligence provides our customers with tangible benefits that can be leveraged to further develop other areas of activity. 

We relish any opportunity to learn from our experience, and whilst we view this recent event as a success, there is always room for improvement and learning. For example, whilst no customer is obliged to inform us of their upcoming activity, increased awareness and planning in scenarios such as this one would enable us to achieve an even higher rate of offloading and reduce the need to rely on bandwidth from physical CDN infrastructures even further. 

System73’s and Edge Intelligence’s performance in delivering the event is documented proof of our operational excellence and ability to provide scalable, cost-effective, and high-quality content delivery solutions under challenging conditions. It allows us to set a strong precedent for our current and future customers, and a high standard for the industry at large, positioning us as a reliable partner for high-stakes, large-scale content delivery worldwide.

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For more information about System73, Edge Intelligence, or to book a call with our team, visit system73.com.

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