Interdigital is levelling the playing field

From the first televised baseball game in 1939 to today’s UHD mobile streams, sports have long driven the evolution of media technology. But as fans migrate from traditional TV to digital platforms, the pressure to deliver seamless, real-time experiences that rival – or surpass – broadcast quality has never been greater.

Despite the explosion of sports streaming services, lots of technical hurdles still pose serious challenges, especially during live events. From global broadcasts like the World Cup to lower-league football matches on niche platforms, the demand for flawless performance is high. A single buffering wheel or lagging frame can turn a season-defining moment into a missed opportunity. Notably, Interdigital’s recent research with Parks Associates found that 31% of sports viewers aged 18 to 24 cite poor video quality, lag and bandwidth limitations as common frustrations.

To meet the rising expectations of audiences, platforms must tackle four critical challenges: latency, buffering, scalability and device compatibility. When these issues arise, they erode user trust and compromise what makes live sports so compelling: immediacy, drama and high-stakes excitement.

A new era of viewer engagement

Live sports’ move to streaming signals a major shift in media consumption, with streaming now overtaking traditional pay TV. Since 2020, the number of US households with traditional pay TV has dropped from 62% to 42%, while subscription video services now reach 89%, up from 76% five years ago.

This shift goes beyond convenience. It reflects a move towards more personalised, user-controlled viewing. Sports fans are a particularly high-value audience. Today, 40% watch sports exclusively via streaming, while another 30% combine streaming with broadcast. These viewers are more engaged and spend more – up to $111 a month for sports-specific services, compared to $64 among non-sports streamers. Sports remain unique in a streaming ecosystem increasingly dominated by on-demand content. With 84% of fans watching at least one live game weekly and 30% of Americans betting on sports, demand for low-latency, reliable streaming is significant.

For broadcasters, making sure to deliver a seamless stream isn’t just a technical necessity, but is essential for maintaining engagement, revenue and brand reputation.

What are the core challenges?

To meet growing viewer expectations, streaming platforms must solve four perennial challenges:

Latency

This refers to the lag between real-time action and what viewers see, and high latency can be especially disruptive. Fans often follow games while messaging friends or browsing social media, and no one wants a spoiler before seeing the moment unfold for themselves. Latency also impacts high-stakes cases like live betting, where timing is everything.

Several factors contribute to this: slow internet, network congestion, centralised routing and the strain of delivering ever-higher video quality.

To address this, the industry is embracing smarter tech. WebRTC and Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs) enable sub-second latency by distributing streams without re-encoding. Edge computing reduces transit time by processing data closer to the viewer. Meanwhile, next-gen codecs such as Versatile Video Coding (VVC) lower latency via parallel processing and efficient compression. These innovations are helping to bring viewers closer to the action, making the experience more immersive than ever.

Buffering

Buffering results in brief pauses when video playback catches up to the data stream, and it’s a source of great frustration for fans. In live sports, buffering breaks the immersive flow of the game and risks fans missing critical moments.

It’s caused by network instability, bandwidth limitations, fluctuations in bit rate and device performance issues. To combat this, adaptive bit rate streaming (ABR) adjusts video quality in real time, based on connection strength. Low-latency protocols like HTTP/3, QUIC, LL-HLS and LL-DASH reduce set-up delays and packet loss. Efficient codecs like VVC shrink file sizes, lowering bandwidth demands and improving stream resilience.

Together, these solutions help ensure fans stay in the moment.

Scalability

Major events like the Super Bowl can draw hundreds of millions of viewers at once. Sudden surges, sparked by dramatic finishes or betting windows, can overwhelm infrastructure and cause delays or outages just when engagement peaks.

Scalability challenges arise from high concurrent demand, increasing use of 4K, HDR and multi-angle streams, as well as unpredictable spikes in viewer activity. To meet demand, platforms are adopting cloud-native architectures that scale resources dynamically. Peer-to-peer (P2P) CDNs distribute content across users, offloading central servers and enhancing reliability. This keeps streams stable and responsive when the stakes are at their highest.

Device compatibility

Fans now expect seamless viewing across smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, consoles and more. But a fragmented device ecosystem makes consistent performance a challenge.

Different platforms have their own requirements. Meanwhile, viewers often switch between devices mid-stream or cast from mobile to TV, which adds complexity.

ABR helps by tailoring delivery to device capabilities and connection quality. Cross-platform protocols like WebRTC standardise playback across browsers, OSs and hardware to deliver consistent, glitch-free viewing wherever fans tune in.

Sports streaming without limits

While improvements in delivery and adaptive streaming enhance performance, codecs remain the foundation. Next-generation solutions like VVC represent a leap forward, offering up to 50% better compression than HEVC and enabling the same video quality with half the data. By reducing both latency and buffering at the source, VVC helps platforms deliver seamless, high-quality streams across devices and networks.

For broadcasters and platforms, getting this right isn’t just about meeting expectations, but setting the standard for what comes next.

Read Interdigital’s full white paper.

This feature was first published in the Autumn 2025 issue of FEED.