From auctions to jumping: How Eqify delivers top-quality real-time streaming experiences

This case study focuses on Eqify’s adoption of Dolby’s real-time streaming to overcome scalability and quality issues, enhancing equestrian event streaming with global reach, adaptive bitrate, and robust analytics.

Eqify is an innovative company that brings technology to the equestrian industry. Their offering includes show jumping, dressage, eventing and free jump. Through http://online.eqify.horse more than 500 competitions can be followed. Eqify has an extensive set of apps that are used during competitions by the officials, such as timekeeping solution for show jumping, digital judging for dressage, judging for free-jump, etc. The Eqify platform currently onboards more than 25k members, 1M horses and 500 clubs, and it provides features such as member, club & horse management, financial handling, competition, registrations and championships. 

Eqify also specializes in live streaming of equestrian competitions and auctions, for which they require real-time video streaming, to make sure that the online biddings are recorded on time for the auctioneer to be able to take them into account.

This case study focuses on Eqify’s adoption of Dolby’s real-time streaming to overcome scalability and quality issues, enhancing equestrian event streaming with global reach, adaptive bitrate, and robust analytics.

The Challenge 

Eqify does live streaming for equestrian events, as well as hybrid auctions. Their setup includes a minimum of three camera feeds which are combined with titles, live bid, pre-recorded videos, and animations such as fireworks, applause and congrats.  

As live auctions require interactivity, real-time streaming is a must. Eqify has leveraged multiple real-time solutions in the past, but these each brought limitations. A first solution had challenges with scaling to more than 100 viewers. Events typically include between 150 and 1000 viewers, so Eqify needed to scale the number of viewers further. They subsequently moved to another solution. Although it was easier to use, they still found that the solution struggled to support all their needs. For example, some mobile users were experiencing black screens when the video was loading. The solution was also lacking viewer analytics, which made it difficult to troubleshoot viewer complaints, and to review overall event performance.

The Solution 

In 2022, Eqify got in contact with the Dolby team, and it only took “two or three events for us to decide to go for it!”, says Joris De Veirman, Founder at Eqify.

The Dolby real-time streaming solution scales over a CDN rather than adding more server instances to the backend, and it hence enables Eqify to stream real-time to any audience size. This way, Eqify can easily reach viewers worldwide, including in Europe, North America, Canada, Mexico and China, without compromising on video quality.

Also, with previous solutions the quality was set to 720p as single quality; but upon shifting to Dolby real-time streaming, they now have adaptive bitrate (ABR) capabilities. “When a viewer is on 3G, then single bitrate streaming at 720p does not work”, said Joris. Dolby real-time streaming ABR capabilities allow Eqify to stream real-time at 1080p, providing for a better quality of experience for viewers with high bandwidth capabilities, while simultaneously delivering lower resolutions/bitrates to viewers with low bandwidth capabilities.

Additionally, thanks to Dolby real-time streaming, the team at Eqify is now able to analyze viewer insights of their real-time streaming events. 

The Results

Integrating Dolby’s real-time streaming solution into Eqify’s platform resulted in the following key benefits:

Scalability

As Dolby’s real-time streaming solution scales over a standard CDN, with global points-of-presence, Eqify can easily reach any audience size worldwide.

High Quality of Experience

Bidders often join auctions via phone, and network conditions can hence vary. Thanks to Dolby real-time streaming, Eqify can bring a higher quality of experience to their viewers worldwide, including ABR, to easily adapt resolution/bit rate to changing network conditions.

Device Coverage

For the live auctions some viewers tend to watch on their phone and bid via a desktop. Having a seamless latency experience between mobile and desktop is hence imperative for the success of the auction. With Dolby’s real-time streaming solution viewers watching real-time streams of horse jumping events or live auctions can seamlessly do this on any device, including on older phone models.

Viewer Insights

With the integration of Dolby real-time streaming, Eqify is now able to monitor viewer analytics of their real-time streams including latency, which devices people stream on, where they are located, and other demographic information. This allows Eqify to easily troubleshoot, and to evaluate event performance.

Seamless Integration and Support

Integrating Dolby real-time streaming into the Eqify platform was very easy and straightforward thanks to the API first approach. “It took no time to integrate” says Joris De Veirman. It was also very easy for Eqify to get started with ingesting RTMP through Vmix thanks to the guides included in the Dolby developer hub, and the proactive support from the Dolby team.

“Since making the shift to Dolby real-time streaming, our partnership with Dolby has been nothing short of fruitful! It was not only easy to integrate, but it also brought us extra value as we can now reach more viewers, and provide them with a better quality of experience at the same time. Also, the support we got from the Dolby team was excellent!”
Joris De Veirman – Founder of Eqify

Summary

Eqify revolutionizes equestrian events with technology, offering tools for competitions, management, and live streaming. Challenges with prior real-time streaming solutions, including scalability issues and limited features, prompted Eqify to look for another streaming provider. By adopting Dolby’s real-time streaming solution, Eqify achieves scalable, high-quality streaming with adaptive bitrate (ABR), ensuring optimal viewing on varying networks and devices. Dolby’s integration provided robust analytics for troubleshooting and performance review. Seamless setup and proactive support further streamlined Eqify’s operations, enabling a superior global audience experience and empowering live auctions and competitions with reliable, real-time interactivity and enhanced viewer engagement.

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