Road to Super Bowl 2023
Road to Super Bowl 2023? Super Bowl 2022 hasn’t even happened. Yes, you read that right — we’re already deep in planning for what’s sure to be another highly-anticipated Super Bowl user experience. The Consumer Products & Engineering team (CPE) at FOX builds products that deliver FOX content to millions of digital consumers across all our verticals. So when it comes to large scale live events, our traffic has the potential to grow upwards of 100x plus our daily numbers and we need to be ready for it. Building and operating resilient systems that scale up to handle millions of concurrent users is a significant engineering challenge — one that takes strategy, planning, and considerable attention to detail. Concurrent users are defined as the total number of users simultaneously accessing or using a service in a predefined period of time. The good news is that for many such large traffic events, the engineering team gets a significant heads-up which allows us to start planning our strategies for how we could handle the estimated traffic spikes to our systems. So here we are in 2021, looking at the road ahead to 2023.
To date, Super Bowl on Fox Sports attracted a larger streaming audience year over year. When Super Bowl LIV was streamed in 2020, we saw a record-breaking audience of 3.32 million peak concurrent viewers on our platform. This was a +30% increase from 2019 ( 2.6 million) and up +103% over FOX’s previous Super Bowl stream in 2017 (1.7 million).
In February 2021, NFL reported that Super Bowl LV attracted a streaming audience of 5.7 million viewers per minute at CBS, up +65% from when FOX streamed Super Bowl LIV the year prior. Given this accelerating growth in online streaming, we estimate that when FOX streams the Super Bowl again in 2023, we could very well be looking at peak concurrency numbers north of 10 million concurrent viewers.
With a live-streaming event, we only have one chance to get it right! So our teams spend the months leading up to the Super Bowl analyzing how our systems hold up to traffic spikes, identify potential bottlenecks, and build solutions to address those. We published these articles over the last year to celebrate and showcase some of the great work we did to make Super Bowl LIV a resounding success. We continue to build upon this body of work, and also tackle new areas of improvement identified based on our learnings from streaming Super Bowl LIV, our anticipated traffic projections, and the ever-changing technology landscape, along with the new opportunities that it affords. With another year to go, and so much work still in progress, we’re excited to share a new series of features exhibiting our areas of focus and what we are doing to prepare for game day. Just a sample of topics to look forward to::
- Strategy for Zero-Downtime Service Migrations: Over the last year, we rebuilt our entire client-facing API layer to increase overall performance, enable fault tolerance and to increase our telemetry and observability for all our microservices. Many times, large migration projects fail because they require significant lead time for development. Organizational priorities shift during this time and migrations tend to get deprioritized. We picked our migration strategy to account for this, and ensured our new systems went to production within days of beginning development. This strategy worked very well for us, and we’ll walk through it in detail.
- Our Multi-Region Strategy: We used AWS’s multi-region capabilities primarily for Disaster Recovery during Super Bowl 2020. For 2023, we are working towards taking full advantage of AWS’s regions and have our systems serving traffic in an active-active configuration from multiple regions. AWS recently announced support for cross-cluster replication on AWS Opensearch Service (formerly AWS Elasticsearch service), which is the final piece of the puzzle that lets us move forward in this direction.
And these are just a couple of the topics we intend to cover in our Road To Super Bowl 2023 series so be on the lookout for more to come and follow us on Medium so you’re the first to know when they come out!
Interested in joining our FOX CPE team and helping deliver Super Bowl 2023 and more? Come join us — we’re actively hiring!
