For those not steeped in the game from a young age, it’s difficult to comprehend the fervour and passion that cricket engenders in its fans. A sport with complex rules and bizarre terminology, cricket mixes tactics, bravery, camaraderie and players’ artistry in contests that can last a few hours to several days.

In countries where cricket is taken seriously, daily life has been known to grind to a halt as huge sections of the population down tools for a particularly important match. Wherever cricketing nations’ people may be, you can be sure that streets and normally crowded public areas fall eerily quiet during an important match.

It’s in this context that sports’ broadcasters work, showing live footage and content to an audience more akin to a religious following than merely supporters. Making sure the game reaches its audience without any interruption isn’t the main thing that matters, it’s the only thing.

In the digital age, therefore, being the Chief Technology Officer of Starzplay, one of the primary broadcasters of sport in the Middle East, comes with no small measure of responsibility. On the field, a missed catch will be met with extremes of joy or despair, depending on the loyalties of those at the ground. Online, however, a single dropped frame at a key moment is a borderline sin, unforgiven by millions of fans worldwide.

Faraz Arshad of Starzplay knows well, therefore, that choices of the technology that carries match footage are critically important. Plus, this being 2024, he also has to ensure that rich media content around sport has to continue to flow when play on field has drawn to a close – engaging the audience with personalised content that will keep them on the Starzplay platform.

Ball-by-ball coverage, no exceptions

StarzPlay reaches millions of users in the Middle East and North Africa, where fans of cricket and other sports (apparently, there are other sports), receive exclusive, personalised content and live coverage. As you might expect, key games, and pivotal moments during them can cause massive spikes in demand for streamed media.

“We see thousands of subscribers the moment [a match] starts,” Faraz told the Huawei Cloud Summit, held recently in Dubai as part of the Gitex 2024 technology exhibition.

“I don’t know if you are into cricket?” he asked the audience. “If a big cricket game is happening, you can see [workload] spikes, and they can grow within a few seconds.”

Choosing the Huawei Cloud platform has enabled Starzplay to cope with this type of massively fluctuating demand. Huawei Cloud’s solution offers the company (and indeed, all Huawei Cloud users) advantages, derived from its infrastructure and a raft of supporting technology:

• The global presence of Huawei Cloud CDN PoPs (points of presence) means Starzplay’s services in countries such as Saudi Arabia and UAE run with a latency less than 20ms and a buffer ratio under 4%. The average buffer ratio of Huawei Cloud in any specified time range is 1–2%, four times lower than that of other vendors (4–10%).
• Key assurance services are provided during trending events like the the biggest games. A practical example is in traffic planning: Traffic allocation to PoPs is based on peak bandwidth demand forecasts for different countries. The necessary capacity is provisioned accordingly via load-balanced, local and cross-regional CDN PoPs.

An end-user, of course, sees the benefits without necessarily registering the smart nature of what’s going on in the background. But, we would bet there are a good few systems administrators at Starzplay whose lives have become a great deal less stressful.

Next steps in personalisation

Today’s audience demographics mean that content recommendations along the lines of ‘you might also like’ just aren’t going to cut the mustard. Discerning cricket fans know the difference between a silly-mid-on and a long leg, yet those new to the game may not (yet) know some of the basics. Personalising content is a complex beast when the subject matter is arcane and specialist.

The facilities of the Huawei stack has already been keeping fans glued to Starzplay services for longer: engagement is up 30%, Faraz said. Recommendations tailored to individual viewing tastes have led to a huge overall increase in content consumption per user, which is now, on average, two hours per day, per user – cricket fans like to be immersed in the game and its lore.

Additionally, there are plans to fine-tune personalisation for each customer using some of the power of Huawei’s AI offerings. “So today, we are serving [the customer] recommendations while watching. Tomorrow, we have some new tech where we going to be recommending at a personalised price point. That’s a big thing we are working on. What kind of price points would you [comfortably] pay, and when is the right time to charge?”

Huawei’s game plan for its partnership with Starzplay is more five-day Test Match than the much shorter Twenty20 (where games are done and dusted in just a couple of hours).

“With Huawei, I would say the journey was not just about moving our workloads or compute or storage, but also to learn the AI capabilities [of the platform] and move towards transforming ourselves in terms of performance efficiencies and fast delivery times.”

“Huawei is not just a cloud for us, but a transformation engine,” Faraz concluded.