Why Fastly

fuboTV is frequently the only platform available for watching high-demand sporting events: it’s therefore critical to provide reliable and uninterrupted streams for customers. Although fuboTV first approached Fastly in 2015 as an efficient solution for caching the static assets on its service, it has since leveraged Fastly’s edge cloud network to accelerate the delivery of live and on demand video, speed up APIs — allowing fuboTV to serve their applications faster, which wasn’t possible with other providers — and load-balance between data centers to ensure maximum availability for their users across the globe. With more than 100,000 paying customers, fuboTV’s user base is growing: viewing time per user is up 25% since April 2017, and traffic to Fastly has increased 7x since March 2017. fuboTV sees Fastly as a partner that complements its workflows, enabling continuous deployment while providing high-quality and reliable streaming experiences to sports fans around the world.

Delivering 100k live streams

During a major event, fuboTV can see upwards of 100,000 concurrent streams, and it’s critical to offer viewers uninterrupted access to events. fuboTV relies on Fastly’s CDN as a caching layer for video content, and implements complex logic for failover using Fastly’s Custom VCL. When a request comes in, Fastly will check its primary data center in the West Coast; if the video content isn’t available there, Fastly will fail over to the Central region. fuboTV use multiple levels of failover — at the player, CDN, and API level — to ensure viewers can watch the event as it’s happening.

In advance of Super Bowl LII, fuboTV expanded its coverage from 51% to 70% of US households, and saw record-breaking engagement as a result. More than 150,000 viewers tuned in on Super Bowl Sunday, and average concurrent per-minute streams came in at just below 60,000. Unlike most sporting events — where users drop off during halftime and commercials — viewership remained high the entire game, and even increased at halftime. fuboTV saw 57% of Big Game streaming take place on TV-connected devices, and achieved a record-low buffer rate of 0.49% from 6pm to 11pm ET — about 200% lower than industry standard.

fuboTV’s streams are the closest you can get to actually being in the stadium — around 8-10 seconds ahead of other streaming platforms — which it achieves by offering smaller segment sizes, which allows for smaller buffers on both the player side and encoder side. Because Fastly allows it to cache smaller and more frequent updates, fuboTV can offer a streaming experience that’s closer to the real thing than other streaming providers.

Staying up for major events + cutting costs

Because fuboTV is often the only resource for certain games, it will see large spikes in traffic during major events. For example, the World Cup Qualifier between the USA and Argentina in October 2017 brought 7x more traffic than what it usually sees on the weekends, and double its past peak event traffic. These high-demand events make it even more critical that fuboTV provides high-quality and uninterrupted streaming experiences, and it relies on Fastly to help.

fuboTV uses Fastly’s shielding feature to designate a specific POP as a shield node for their origins, protecting its origins from surges in traffic and lowering egress costs.

Accelerating APIs + localizing content

fuboTV relies on Fastly’s CDN to cache its website as well as API endpoints, which include all front end web applications (such as the program guide), mobile, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, and Fire TV applications. Unlike other providers, Fastly enables fuboTV to cache APIs, empowering it to offer fast and reliable experiences for their viewers.

fuboTV viewers watch games across different devices; recent subscribers tend to primarily view on desktop, mobile, and tablet, while longer-term subscribers tend to watch on connected TV devices.

fuboTV also uses Fastly to provide personalized experiences to viewers — sports fans are served unique recommendations based on where they’re located.

More control for continuous deployment

fuboTV does two deployments a week for every service it has — around 18-20 per week — for when it rolls out new API endpoints or front end applications. Fastly’s edge cloud network gives fuboTV control to support this continuous workflow; it relies on Fastly's Instant Purge™ and Cache-Control headers to ensure it is delivering the most up-to-date applications to its users.

Increased visibility + support

With Fastly, fuboTV has real-time access to logs, which are streamed to Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage to gain insight into traffic. This enables it to diagnose problems immediately.

When fuboTV does need help, it finds Fastly support knowledgeable and responsive.