Global Sports Streaming Platform on AWS

Direct-to-consumer OTT delivery with real-time engagement analytics, adaptive bitrate streaming across all devices, and per-match or subscription monetisation — without managing physical CDN infrastructure.

Vimond handles OTT product logic (authentication, entitlements, player, payments) while AWS handles ingest, transcoding, storage, delivery, and analytics — clear separation of concerns with each layer independently scalable.

Multi-AZ MediaLive pipeline, CloudFront Origin Shield, S3 Cross-Region Replication for VOD assets, and Kinesis On-Demand capacity mode — ensuring no single component failure disrupts the broadcast.

Kick-off moments, goals, and VAR reviews trigger simultaneous stream requests from millions of concurrent viewers within seconds. Delivery infrastructure must absorb these spikes without buffering or dropped streams.

Viewers span the UK, US, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Last-mile latency from a single origin region produces unacceptable quality-of-experience metrics for distant viewers.

The platform must support pay-per-view per match, recurring subscription tiers, and geo-restricted content windows — requiring flexible entitlement logic that cannot be baked into CDN configuration alone.

Broadcasting rights are geo-restricted per territory. The platform must enforce blackout rules in markets where rights are held by a third party, and maintain an auditable event log for rights compliance reporting.

Vimond's entitlement service checks the subscriber's active product access (PPV or subscription), validates the territory against the geo-restriction ruleset, and — on success — calls the Vimond backend to generate a CloudFront signed URL with a 3-hour expiry tied to the viewer session.

The Vimond OTT player is embedded in the web and mobile app. It handles HLS and DASH manifest loading, ABR switching logic, DRM token exchange (Widevine for Android/Chrome, FairPlay for Apple), buffering strategy, and the heartbeat event emission to the analytics endpoint.

Match schedules, team lineups, match thumbnails, and EPG data are managed in Vimond's CMS. The OTT app fetches content metadata from Vimond's API, whilst the actual stream manifests are served directly from CloudFront — minimising Vimond API calls per viewer per session.

Territory rules are maintained in Vimond's rights management module. CloudFront's geo-restriction feature provides a secondary enforcement layer — blocking requests from blacklisted countries at the CDN edge before they reach origin, reducing origin load and strengthening rights compliance.

Standard channel class provides two independent encoding pipelines (Pipeline 0 and Pipeline 1) operating simultaneously. Both pipelines produce identical output. MediaPackage receives output from both pipelines and uses the primary; if MediaPackage detects a gap in the primary pipeline's segment sequence, it automatically switches to the secondary within one segment interval (2 seconds).

The contribution feed from the stadium is transported via AWS Elemental MediaConnect with ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest) and FEC (Forward Error Correction) to compensate for packet loss over the contribution circuit. A backup RTMP push path is configured as a secondary MediaLive input, auto-selected if the primary MediaConnect flow fails.

Six renditions from 240p to 1080p60 cover the full range of viewer connection speeds. The keyframe interval is fixed at 2 seconds across all renditions — a requirement for seamless ABR switching. The 1080p60 profile targets a broadcast-quality 8 Mbps peak bitrate using H.264 (AVC). H.265 (HEVC) is available for HbbTV and connected TV outputs to reduce bandwidth by ~40% at equivalent quality.

CEA-608 and CEA-708 captions are passed through from the contribution feed and included in the HLS and DASH manifests as separate caption tracks. MediaLive supports pass-through of embedded captions without re-encoding, preserving the original caption timing.

Three endpoints are configured per channel: HLS (for Apple devices and Safari), DASH (for Android and web browsers), and CMAF with Low-Latency HLS for viewers on supported players seeking sub-5-second glass-to-glass latency. Each endpoint has a 30-second manifest window and a segment duration of 2 seconds.

MediaPackage's Time-Shifted Viewing (TSV) feature maintains a rolling 6-hour content window. This allows viewers who join mid-match to start from kick-off, and supports a catch-up window covering the match + half-time period. The TSV window is stored in MediaPackage's managed origin store — no S3 bucket is required for this feature.

A MediaPackage Harvest Job is triggered via EventBridge 5 minutes after scheduled full-time. It clips the full match (typically 105–120 minutes) into a complete HLS VOD asset and writes the output to S3. A second Harvest Job clips a 10-minute highlights package. Both jobs complete within 2–3 minutes of job creation.

VOD assets land in S3 Standard. An S3 Lifecycle policy transitions objects to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days (infrequent access, lower cost) and to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after 90 days (archival with millisecond retrieval for compliance requests). Cross-Region Replication copies match recordings to a second region within 15 minutes of upload.

Origin Shield is enabled in eu-west-1 (London) — the closest available Origin Shield region to the MediaPackage origin. All CloudFront PoPs around the world route cache misses through Origin Shield before reaching MediaPackage. This collapses the thundering herd at kick-off (when all 500,000 viewers simultaneously request the first segment) into a single cache-fill request per segment reaching MediaPackage, protecting origin from amplified load.

Live manifests (.m3u8 files) have a TTL of 2 seconds — matching the segment interval — so viewers always receive a fresh segment index. Segment files (.ts and .fmp4) are immutable once written and carry a 1-year TTL. VOD assets on the /vod/* path have a 7-day manifest TTL and a 1-year segment TTL. This TTL split ensures live viewers get fresh manifests without overwhelming origin on every segment request.

All live stream paths require a CloudFront signed URL. Vimond's backend generates the signed URL using an RSA private key associated with a CloudFront key group. The signed URL covers the manifest path with a time-limited policy expiring 3 hours after issuance. CloudFront rejects requests without a valid signature before they reach origin, preventing unauthorised stream access.

CloudFront Price Class All is used — distributing content from all 400+ edge locations globally. Given Manchester United's major audience regions (UK, Europe, US, Southeast Asia, Middle East), Price Class All delivers the optimal cache hit ratio and latency profile. Price Class 100 (US/Europe only) or Price Class 200 (US/Europe/Asia) would reduce cost but increase latency for the high-revenue Asian and Middle Eastern markets.

The player event stream receives heartbeat events (every 10 seconds per viewer) and QoE events (buffering start/end, bitrate switch, error, rebuffer ratio) from the Vimond player SDK via API Gateway and Lambda proxy. At 500,000 concurrent viewers with a 10-second heartbeat interval, this stream processes ~50,000 records/second. On-Demand capacity mode is used — Kinesis automatically scales shard count up to the service default limit, handling burst without manual shard management.

CloudFront Real-Time Logs deliver CDN access records to a second Kinesis stream. At 250,000 requests/second peak, this stream requires provisioned shards at 1,000 records/second write throughput per shard — approximately 250 shards minimum. On-Demand mode is used to handle the rapid ramp-up at kick-off without pre-provisioning. Each record is approximately 500 bytes; at 250,000 records/second, the stream handles ~125 MB/second — well within the 1 MB/second per shard write limit when distributed across 250+ On-Demand shards.

Each Kinesis Data Stream shard supports 1,000 records/second or 1 MB/second on writes (whichever is reached first), and 2 MB/second on reads. With Enhanced Fan-Out, each registered consumer gets a dedicated 2 MB/second read throughput per shard — essential when multiple Lambda functions (analytics, CDN dashboard, audit logger) consume from the same stream concurrently without competing for read capacity.

Player event stream retention is set to 7 days (default). For rights compliance audit requirements (90-day retention), a Lambda consumer writes raw player events to S3 (partitioned by match ID, date, and viewer region) within 60 seconds of receipt. Kinesis does not retain data beyond 7 days natively; S3 is the authoritative long-term event store for compliance purposes.

Each Lambda function consuming from Kinesis is connected via an Event Source Mapping with a batch size of 100 records and a batch window of 5 seconds. The parallelisation factor is set to 10 — meaning Lambda spawns up to 10 concurrent invocations per shard, each processing a subset of the batch in parallel. With 200 On-Demand shards at peak, this allows up to 2,000 concurrent Lambda invocations per consumer function. Lambda's default concurrency limit of 1,000 per region is a hard constraint — reserved concurrency is allocated per function to prevent one consumer from exhausting the regional pool.

Lambda's maximum function timeout is 900 seconds (15 minutes). Analytics processing functions are designed to complete within 30 seconds per batch — well within the limit. The EventBridge-triggered channel management functions (start/stop, harvest job creation) may run for up to 5 minutes while polling for channel state transitions. Idempotency keys are used on all state-mutation operations to prevent duplicate channel starts if the function is retried.

A Lambda function aggregates concurrent viewer counts from the player heartbeat stream and writes to DynamoDB every 10 seconds. The DynamoDB table uses match_id as the partition key and minute_of_match as the sort key, enabling time-series queries for the live viewership chart. DynamoDB on-demand capacity mode is used to absorb write spikes at kick-off without pre-provisioning WCUs.

EventBridge schedules control the match-day workflow: T-4h triggers MediaLive channel start and health verification; T-0 triggers WAF rule activation; T+90min triggers Harvest Job creation; T+120min triggers channel stop and WAF rule deactivation; T+24h triggers S3 lifecycle tagging for completed match assets. Each Lambda publishes a custom CloudWatch metric on success and failure for operational visibility.

Standard channel, 6-output ABR ladder, 4-hour active window (T-4h to T+0h post-match): approximately $180–$220 per match depending on region. Channel is stopped between match days — no idle charges. 10 home matches: ~$2,000/season for encoding alone.

500,000 viewers × 3 hours × 30 segment requests/min × ~250 KB/segment = approximately 675 TB of data transfer per match. At $0.0085/GB (Price Class All, blended), this is approximately $5,700/match. Origin Shield adds ~$0.0010/GB for cache fills — negligible relative to edge transfer. 10 matches: ~$57,000/season.

On-Demand mode pricing: $0.08 per million records written. At 50,000 player events/second for 3 hours = ~540 million records. Cost: ~$43/match for the player event stream. CDN log stream at similar volume: ~$43/match. Enhanced Fan-Out: $0.015 per shard-hour — minimal relative to records pricing. 10 matches: ~$860/season for Kinesis.

At 2,000 concurrent invocations × 3 hours × typical 5-second duration per invocation: approximately 2 million invocations/match. At $0.20 per million invocations + $0.0000166667 per GB-second at 512 MB: approximately $25/match. Operational Lambdas (channel management, harvest) add negligible cost. 10 matches: ~$250/season.

10 matches × ~40 GB per 1080p60 full match = 400 GB for full recordings. Highlights (10 × 2 GB) = 20 GB. Cross-Region Replication doubles storage cost. At $0.023/GB/month for Standard, lifecycle transitions to Standard-IA and Glacier Instant Retrieval reduce long-term cost significantly. Annual storage cost: under $50 for a season's recordings.

Encoding: ~$2,000 · Delivery: ~$57,000 · Analytics: ~$1,100 · Storage: ~$500 · MediaPackage + WAF + other: ~$3,000. Total estimated season cost: approximately $63,000–$68,000 for 10 home matches at 500,000 peak concurrent viewers. Per-viewer per-match cost: ~$0.13.