Cheltenham Festival nears 500K concurrent viewers — world’s largest WebRTC streaming audience
The 2021 Cheltenham Festival, the world’s premier Jumps racing fixture, set a record number for the number of concurrent streams for a British horseracing event, and likely the largest global WebRTC streaming event. Streaming 28 races over four days, each with over 100,000 peak concurrent viewers, and four races with over 400,000 peak concurrent viewers, the event shows the power of scalable real-time streaming to global audiences.
Powered by the real-time streaming Phenix Platform, the event achieved concurrent streams approaching 500,000 on individual races and achieving over 60% YoY growth across the Festival, with over 10,000,000 total views of the races. The biggest week in British Jumps racing saw multiple streaming records broken each day, including the highest ever race volume being broken nine times in four days, to a peak of 478,000 concurrent viewers.
Stats Perform, the sports tech leader in data and artificial intelligence, worked with Racecourse Media Group (RMG) to integrate Phenix’s proprietary and patented technology to provide industry leading streaming services for RMG.
We were looking for a real-time streaming solution to support in play betting, that would also scale for our largest events like Cheltenham. The Phenix technology gives us a platform from which we can grow in play betting on horse racing, and the team has been extremely supportive and responsive.
Ben Dowding, Director of Betting, RMG
The collaboration with Phenix means RMG, the UK and Ireland’s largest manager of horse racing rights, now delivers real-time live streaming experiences from its 61 racetracks to sportsbooks. It was previously at circa eight seconds latency on bookmakers’ platforms when viewed on mobile devices.
“Our work alongside Stats Perform and Racecourse Media Group up to and including this year’s Cheltenham Festival exceeded our expectations,” said Roy Reichbach, CEO of Phenix. “As an early adopter for real-time streaming, RMG is showing the rest of the sports industry that there is significant demand for real-time video.”
Alex Rice, Chief Rights Officer at Stats Perform, said “We are proud to support RMG in their delivery of UK and Irish horse racing. Cheltenham race week provides an exceptional challenge in delivery, and we are delighted our platform, integrated with Phenix technology, delivered record breaking audiences for RMG and their betting operator clients. Phenix has been an excellent partner. The Phenix platform coped extremely well with the challenges the Cheltenham Festival brings.”
When it comes to racing events, every second matters. And when it comes to streaming racing events where betting relies on real-time information, it’s milliseconds. In-game or mid-event bidding requires that all viewers, or those watching and interacting from a mobile device have a synchronized experience so that nobody has an unfair advantage.
Leveraging the Phenix Platform, bookmakers can ensure the fastest streams, most reliable data, and ensure that every device from mobile phones, smart TVs, web players, set-top-boxes and more can share in the action, without any latency.
For more information about the Phenix Platform, or how it powers real-time streaming and betting platforms, visit: https://www.phenixrts.com/solutions/sports-betting.