TORONTO – The Rogers sports department sure has been keeping its wireless division hopping with all this new hockey business.
Rogers Communications CEO Guy Laurence said yesterday that in just the first two weeks of the hockey season, there have been one million downloads of its new NHL GameCentre app and that 650 Terabytes of data have flowed through the app with an average of 80,000 fans streaming live games and on-demand video content through the application. Big numbers. A good start.
While many are doing this on Wi-Fi to save their data plan, there has been undeniable stress on the Rogers Wireless network, but so far there have been few hiccups besides, of course, the Bell complaint to the CRTC over the GamePlus feature within the app.
“With respect to crybaby Bell, what can I say? From what I understand, when they presented their pitch to the NHL to try and win the rights, they didn’t have an innovation component whereas we had a very high innovation component and one can only theorize that’s why they lost the deal in the first place,” Laurence told financial analysts during the company’s Q3 conference call.
“Having lost it, here they are complaining and trying to stifle innovation in hockey instead of actually applauding it… and then they’ve taken this puerile attitude of filing a complaint.”
That aside, there is a tremendous amount of work which must be done, at a very quick pace, in order to make the app run right, from ingest and edit of the video content to the push onto the app and then to allow customers to download it – and especially when big groups of people in one area suddenly call upon the app (and the nearby cell towers) to deliver highlights or replays as soon as possible.
“We have a separate team that’s pulling all the content for GameCentre Live, so they create the content and they’re uploading directly,” Laurence explained when asked by Cartt.ca about how Media and Wireless work together. The content then goes into the cloud “and we’re then distributing out to various distribution points across Canada so the customers can download it,” he explained.
When it comes to highlights, the GameCentre team – from “point of incidence” (a goal or penalty or other play) – cuts the replays from up to eight cameras, uploads them, gets them to the distribution points and then allows people to download them in about three minutes. “We’ve been running at about three minutes twenty seconds in terms of our ability to do that and in one of the games, got it down to 1:50, which is pretty spectacular when you think of the amount of links in the technology chain that are involved,” said Laurence.
“At one point there was more people streaming content in Dundas Square through the NHL app than there were in the whole of the U.S.” – Guy Laurence, Rogers
From there, the folks in the Rogers Wireless network operations centre monitors each cell site, as they do usually, to see where the demand is highest.
Opening night, October 8, was a particular challenge. “When we had the big event in Dundas Square, at one point there was more people streaming content in Dundas Square through the NHL app than there were in the whole of the U.S.,” Laurence explained.
“The towers were almost melting at that point because we had so much content coming down off the network. Fortunately, we guessed that would happen so we had a very sophisticated piece of kit called a COW, a cell-on-wheels, not a moo-thing that gives milk, and actually that took the load up in that particular instance.
“Now what we’re seeing interestingly is certain hotspots in places like pubs and clubs where at certain times of the evening we can see certain towers coming under stress in terms of the amount of downloads they’ve got.”
The answer? More spectrum. And more transmitters. The company has boosted its network coverage of Toronto's Air Canada Centre, so that its network there is not overwhelmed when people want to see replays while at the game.
“Just remember we bought an awful lot of spectrum earlier in the year and we’re deploying that very quickly and bringing it online and there could be another announcement about that fairly soon as well,” he added – perhaps alluding to today’s press release on the company’s LTE-Advanced launch in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Windsor, London, Hamilton, Toronto, Kingston, Moncton, Fredericton, Halifax and Saint John.
He could have been talking about something else though (a shomi launch, perhaps?), urging reporters on the call “not to go away anywhere” between now and mid-November.
We wait with bated breath…
