Endeavor Streaming, the global leader in premium video distribution and monetization for live and on-demand content, has played an integral role in powering World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) streaming platform since its partnership inception in early 2019. The WWE’s OTT service, WWE Network, is an award-winning platform, delivering live and on demand WWE content across the globe. Endeavor Streaming currently powers the network’s back-end operations, while allowing the WWE to retain control over their client applications. 

Every year, the WWE organizes several major marquee events, including WrestleMania and the Royal Rumble. The wrestling and entertainment giant knew they needed to collaborate with a streaming partner who could assist with migrating a large global audience onto the platform while also driving  subscriptions. Partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) was crucial to helping Endeavor Streaming provide and distribute a live streaming experience for Wrestlemania 36 on the WWE’s OTT platform. 

“One of the biggest advantages to using AWS was its control-plane APIs and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) virtual servers, which allowed us to handle millions of requests simultaneously, all while delivering a best in-class broadcast,” said Gonçalo Luiz, SVP and Chief Technology Officer of Platform at Endeavor Streaming.  

Using Cloud-Based Virtual Servers to Provide Fully Customized End-to-End Services   

Utilizing two AWS regional hotspots in Dublin, Ireland and Frankfurt, Germany, Luiz said Endeavor Streaming handles over 2.5 billion API requests and over 6 billion heartbeats monthly, accounting for 9.7 million video sessions. Wrestlemania’s volume was no different. 

Along with EC2, Endeavor Streaming also leveraged AWS Kinesis and AWS SQS to architect their systems to handle an extremely large volume of requests while still being able to provide low latency responses to the end user. It was only by designing their systems to be loosely coupled and perform as many asynchronous operations as possible were Endeavor Streaming able to scale to meet WWE’s needs.  

“We were able to accept and register a hockey stick of purchases that exceeded the credit card payment processor’s capability, yet we were still able to allow everyone in to enjoy the show without the users ever noticing, continuing to deliver a seamless end-user experience,” said Luiz. 

The heavy workload performed by the EC2 servers enabled Endeavor Streaming to focus more on other back-end operations, such as delivering customizable user interfaces to various regions worldwide, transcoding the event into multiple language offerings and subtitles, and meeting other video-on-demand requests. 

Swift Time to Market 

A core differentiator for Endeavor Streaming is the ability to launch and distribute a broadcaster’s content in a short amount of time without sacrificing quality. Amazon Aurora Global Database enabled Endeavor Streaming to stand up a geographically redundant infrastructure for the WWE, improving its resilience to local hardware, network or power failures. 

 “We were able to know in real time  how many users logged in, purchased a match, started a stream, which devices were being used to consume the event, and other key performance metrics,” said Luiz. “We were also able to cross replicate data from both the Ireland and Frankfurt servers without increasing latency for the users.” 

In addition to real time data, Endeavor Streaming was able to share a high-level and comprehensive audience overview with the WWE, so they could better understand the user journey prior to, during, and after the Wrestlemania event. 

Improving the Overall Consumer Experience 

Amazon Web Services has been a key driver in Endeavor Streaming’s evolution into becoming the premium, end-to-end streaming service provider for major sports, media, and entertainment brands worldwide. Luiz says working with AWS has helped the company expand its live stream capabilities and better differentiate itself among its global competitors. 

“Since we incorporated AWS into our back-end workflow just over 8 years ago, it (AWS) has helped us augment our abilities and set a path to pull off a massive scale, live event like Wrestlemania,” said Luiz.  

The onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic in March 2020 forced the English Football League (EFL), the world’s first original football (soccer) league, to pause its season. When government officials in the United Kingdom allowed live sports to resume their season later that spring without fans in attendance, the EFL had to get creative in the way it provided live match coverage to those at home. The league worked with Endeavor Streaming to ensure every single match for the duration of the 2019-2020 season would be available to stream.

Thanks to its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Endeavor Streaming was able to power both the front-end and back-end operations of the EFL’s streaming platform, iFollow. Available on mobile, desktop and tablet devices, iFollow provides live streaming of matches, audio match commentary, behind-the-scenes content, newsletters, and match highlights.  

“Using AWS’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) virtual servers and Amazon Aurora Global Database allowed us to sell and deliver football on a wide scale to the fans who were prohibited from going to the stadium at the time,” said Gonçalo Luiz, Senior VP and Chief Technology Officer of Platform at Endeavor Streaming. “We leveraged AWS’s horizontal scalability to transcode as many as 70 live streams concurrently. Prior to using AWS eight years ago, we lacked the capability to achieve a concurrency of this magnitude.”  

The heavy workload performed by the EC2 servers enabled Endeavor Streaming to focus more on enhancing other back-end operations, such as delivering customizable user interface to various regions around the world, transcoding content into multiple language offerings and subtitles, and meeting other video-on-demand requests.  

Sustaining a Best-in-Class Product Throughout a 9-Month Season 

As a result of its strategic partnership with AWS, Endeavor Streaming was able to live stream over 4,300 EFL matches, resulting in 20,500 hours of video on-demand content, and over 1 billion minutes of viewership over the course of a nine-month season. 

AWS’s Amazon Aurora Global Database helped Endeavor Streaming provide a geographically redundant infrastructure, improving its resilience to local hardware, network or power failures. Endeavor Streaming also leveraged AWS Kinesis to constantly feed internal and external data dashboards throughout the season. 

“We were able to know in real time how many users logged in, purchased a match, started a stream, which devices were being used to consume the event, and other key performance metrics,” said Luiz. 

In addition to real-time data, Endeavor Streaming was able to share weekly viewership intelligence with their client, enabling the EFL to better understand the user journey. The EFL then used those touchpoints to brainstorm and implement strategies to engage and draw in more viewers. 

Improving the Overall Consumer Experience 

Working alongside Amazon Web Services has furthered Endeavor Streaming’s position as a global leader in the live events streaming space. Luiz said AWS products have enabled Endeavor Streaming to expand its platform streaming capabilities to support a virtually unlimited number of concurrent events and multi-million concurrent viewers.

“Unlike a five or six hour pay-per-view event where the technology must provide the flexibility to scale a singular event of that magnitude vertically, in this particular example, the technology of AWS provided us the predictability and reliability to consistently also scale horizontally to execute dozens of live streams, each involving a wide range of touchpoints from online purchases to data processing, on a weekly basis for the entire nine-month season.”