Deeper Dive—The CDN battle rumbling underneath livestreamed sports

Competition, and the concept of a winner and a loser, are what make sports compelling. Those same ideas are at play in streaming live sports—at least, for the content delivery network vendors facilitating those streams.During any large-scale livestreaming event expected to attract a large audience—typically live sports—broadcasters and programmers will often employ multiple CDN providers for the sake of redundancy and efficiency. It also allows the broadcaster to load balance and keep streams as close to broadcast quality as possible. It probably goes without saying that sports fans—particularly in the social media era—are fairly unforgiving when it comes to interruptions in the action.This week DAZN, a sports streaming service plotting a U.S. launch for later this year, selected Limelight Networks, a CDN provider as well as a cloud security and edge computing firm, to help with delivering on-demand and live sports. DAZN laid out the importance of CDNs like Limelight in keeping livestreams on track.