The next-generation in-stadium experience (keynote)

Abstract

YinzCam is a cloud-hosted service that provides sports fans with real-time scores, news, photos, statistics, live radio, streaming video, etc., on their mobile devices. YinzCam’s infrastructure is currently hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and supports over 30 million installs of the official mobile apps of 140+ NHL/NFL/NBA/NRL/NCAA sports teams and venues. YinzCam’s workload is necessarily multi-modal (e.g., pre-game, in-game, post-game, game-day, non-gameday), with normal game-time traffic being twenty-fold of that on non-game days. This paper describes the evolution of YinzCam’s production architecture and distributed infrastructure, from its beginnings in 2009, when it was used to support thousands of concurrent users, to today’s system that supports millions of concurrent users on any game day. We also discuss key new opportunities to improve the fan experience inside the stadium of the future, without impacting the available bandwidth, by crowd-sourcing the thousands of mobile devices that are in fans’ hands inside these venues. We present Krowd, a novel distributed key-value store for promoting efficient content sharing, discovery and retrieval across the mobile devices inside a stadium. We present CHIPS, a system that ensures that users’ privacy is maintained while their devices participate in the crowdsourced infrastructure.