World Champion Fantasy
Overview
World Champion Fantasy’s PlayerX bridges the gap between fantasy sports and esports. For the first time ever, esports fans get to be a part of the action, no more watching from the sidelines.
PlayerX allows fans to assemble a dream team of esports athletes and live-stream games that simultaneously display insights and stats. PlayerX elevates the traditional fantasy sports experience by enabling fans to customize interactive avatars and theme music, providing expansive chat capabilities, and more. Another appealing feature is that PlayerX subscribers no longer have to search multiple platforms for the most up-to-date information and highlights of their favorite streamers and athletes. These features are available on one non-gambling platform suitable for all ages.
“[PlayerX] is a big deal for the future of fantasy sports – and Edgio understood this vision. This partnership puts the fantasy sports user experience front-and-center, utilizing data, engagement insights, and streaming capabilities to deliver dynamic and engaging fan experiences,” said Mike Vela, CEO of World Champion Fantasy. “The fantasy experience is one-dimensional, with users simply interacting with text and numbers. By incorporating real-time stats and video into our PlayerX platform, users can flex and troll their opponents, search and watch the best clips and share highlights with their friends and followers.”
Challenge
Easy accessibility, free viewing, and 24/7 streaming contributed to the rapid growth in esports popularity. The pandemic led to viewing spikes across all live-streaming platforms, driving even more technological innovations. While the esports market encountered challenges with canceled in-person tournaments, it also had considerable growth and expanded into markets with little activity. According to Newzoo, the global esports audience will reach 532 million in 2022, with esports enthusiasts — those who watch esports content more than once a month — accounting for just over 261 million.
This fast-growing audience has high standards and will not tolerate poor video quality or downtime. A successful esports streaming business requires reliable technology that consistently delivers high-quality experiences. To launch PlayerX, World Champion Fantasy needed to:
Ingest multiple simultaneous live eGaming tournaments
Deliver high-quality experiences with zero downtime
Capture specific highlights based on predetermined criteria
Publish game highlights on social media as they happen
Solution
Edgio enabled a workflow that allowed World Champion Fantasy to go to market quickly with PlayerX and scale operations at a fraction of the resources. For the beta launch, World Champion Fantasy leveraged Uplynk to ingest and manage live eGaming tournament feeds for the top 3-4 games (e.g., CS:GO, Valorant, League of Legends, and Fortnite) and delivered optimized streams at scale. For further workflow efficiencies, Edgio's professional services team worked closely with World Champion Fantasy to create tooling that helps automate the process. Edgio provides World Champion Fantasy with the following:
Cloud ingest to ingest feeds from their third-party partner, Grid Networks
Global delivery to ensure every viewer has an optimal experience
Clipping Tool to generate compelling highlight videos (e.g., five straight kills)
Syndication capabilities to stream highlights to YouTube and other popular social media sites
Outcome
Esports is the fastest-growing sport. The rise in viewership will continue to persist due to trends like the increase of mobile esports that appeal to younger audiences and gamers in growth markets, the potential of collegiate esports, and the rise in casual esports viewership. Scaling viewers start with scaling infrastructure and workflows. Edgio helped World Champion Fantasy:
Flawlessly manage 7-10 slicers with the ability to scale up at any given time
Reliability trusted by broadcasters for events such as the World Cup, World Series, and Super Bowl
Successfully developed a workflow to automatically capture highlight clips and add them to an extensive on-demand library
Effectively reach fans across all social media outlets with gaming highlights as they happen
Working closely with our team of Advanced Service Architects, iRacing was able to implement Edgio in less than a week.
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