FORT WORTH, Texas—Disc Golf Network is the subscription streaming service of the Disc Golf Pro Tour, providing live and on-demand tournament coverage to viewers worldwide. We worked with Big Blue Marble in August 2023 to connect our production capabilities with a scalable cloud distribution platform supporting reliable live coverage, instant VOD and flexible viewing.
Our events can involve eight to 10 hours of coverage per day, and we believe the viewing experience should remain consistent from the opening coverage to the final moments of play. Our production workflows were capable of creating broadcast-quality output, but our previous streaming platform could not maintain that quality consistently across devices and locations.
As our viewing audience grew, it became clear that reliability alone was not enough. We needed to be able to introduce features quickly and be more responsive to viewer expectations. For a direct-to-consumer sports service, continuous improvement is essential, and we needed a platform that could develop alongside our audience.
Cloud-Based Quality
Our previous platform reduced live streams from 60 frames per second to 30 fps, affecting the fluidity of fast-moving sports coverage. Video-on-demand recordings were slow to become available, viewers could not pause or rewind live broadcasts and the infrastructure had limited capacity to scale when demand increased.
We needed a cloud platform that could preserve the quality of our production output throughout distribution and give us more control over development. It also needed to scale during major tournaments, protect our content and support different subscription tiers.
Big Blue Marble became our strategic architecture and systems integration partner, leading the platform rebuild and defining its architecture, integration standards and operational model. Its team redesigned Disc Golf Network around a modular, cloud-native framework using Cloud Video Kit and AWS Media Services.
The migration was a significant undertaking for both teams because it had to be completed within a demanding timeframe, six months before the new season started in February 2024. Big Blue Marble was confident its products and cloud technology could support the service we had envisioned. Close collaboration helped us deliver the new platform to our audience on schedule.
The new architecture brings encoding, packaging, recording, ad insertion and distribution into a unified cloud environment. Big Blue Marble introduced higher ingest bit rates, more-efficient encoding profiles and consistent 60 fps streaming, allowing us to retain the motion and picture quality created by our production workflow.
Amazon CloudFront supports content delivery, with redundancy and continuous monitoring helping maintain reliable performance. Audience peaks should be a sign of success, rather than a threat to service quality, and the platform automatically expands capacity as traffic grows, helping us maintain picture quality and playback stability when interest is highest. Multi-DRM protects live and on-demand content, and responsive 24/7 support gives our team access to technical assistance throughout live operations.
For sports audiences, the value of coverage does not end with the live broadcast. Cloud processing makes tournament coverage available on demand almost immediately after an event and gives viewers greater control over how they follow it. Automated workflows support Live DVR, so subscribers can pause, rewind and replay coverage.
Foundation for Growth
Professional disc golf now has an active viewing audience of 1.5 million. We expect our live coverage to reach more than 15,000 unique viewers per broadcast and over 200,000 viewers per event across 85 competition days this year. Supporting that growing audience makes it essential the platform can scale without compromising the viewing experience.
The modular architecture gives us greater commercial and operational flexibility with support for multiple subscription tiers, regional customization and future integrations. It also provides clearer insight into service performance and viewing behavior, helping us continue to refine the platform.
By connecting our production capabilities with cloud-based processing and distribution, we have created a more consistent route from the live event to the viewer. The platform has improved the quality, reliability and availability of our coverage and given us greater scope to keep developing the service.
More information is available on the Big Blue Marble website.
