Live streaming of events is a rapidly growing market. Live streaming allows producers to reach a broader audience, allows for deeper engagement, and provides instant, real-time feedback of the event. Live streaming also opens opportunities for additional revenue streams. However, traditionally, customers, such as owners/operators of a live event, have had to create their own solution, including complex processes, which increase the potential for errors, or have had to use other services such as YouTube®, which may cause the customer to lose control over the branding, monetization, and playback experience.
Streaming media technologies have improved significantly since the 1990s, when delivery was typically uneven. However, the quality of streamed content is still dependent upon the user's connection speed and streaming over the user's connection may fail for many reasons. For example, failure could occur due to camera hardware failure, issues with computer software being run with the customer's camera and/or encoder could fail, server failure, network connection failure, and the like. Typical solutions to the problems associated with live event streaming involve multi-step or manual operations; for example, in the event of a failure, customer may need to manually change the web page/player configuration to point to a Uniform Resource Locator for the backup playlist.