About fuboTV

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.

"Fastly enables an ongoing check to ensure we have the highest availability, so we can deliver uninterrupted live streams to our customers. The Fastly layer failover is the only option that can be completely seamless."
Sung Ho Choi, Co-founder

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.

“By enabling us to cache smaller video segments and instantly purge outdated content, Fastly’s CDN helps us deliver streaming events that are closest to being there live. Fastly also has very low latency, which shaves off several additional milliseconds as compared to alternatives.”
Sung Ho Choi, Co-founder

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.

“Our viewers are very passionate — if something goes wrong, we’ll hear about it — so having a reliable partner like Fastly is key. We saw massive traffic during the World Cup Qualifiers, and are continuing to see large traffic week over week. We have faith that Fastly will continue to support events of all sizes.”
Sung Ho Choi, Co-founder

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.

“Fastly’s shielding feature helps protect our origins from large traffic spikes, cutting costs by 60% a month.”
Sung Ho Choi, Co-founder