Kayo Sports uses Amazon Web Services to deliver personalised subscriber experiences

Amazon Web Services, Inc. has revealed that multi-sports streaming service and content aggregator Kayo Sports is continuing to leverage its technology to deliver video content to more than a million customers while also personalising their sport consumption experience.

Since launching in late 2018, Kayo has run the majority of its information technology infrastructure with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform.

Leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS capabilities, including analytics, machine learning (ML), media services, and network and content delivery, Kayo uses AWS products and services to analyse hundreds of thousands of data points to provide interactive statistics and deeper insights to enhance the viewing experience including SplitView, which enables users to watch up to four sports on one screen, and Kayo Key Moments, which allows users to skip to the best parts of their favourite games.

Kayo uses video infrastructure operated on AWS to instantly stream more than 50 live and on-demand sports, including AFL, NRL, cricket and motorsport, and broadcast simultaneous live events during peak periods.

In April 2021 alone, Kayo delivered more than 25 million hours of sports content.

The dynamic audience size, spiky resource demands, and time bound nature of live events make AWS the ideal solution for Kayo to build solutions that deliver better experiences at scale.

Increasingly, viewers expect more than a one-way presentation of sports content and demand experiences that are more engaging and interactive. Kayo developed a unified data lake on AWS, integrating internal and external sources of data, including customer behaviour, preferences, profile information, and other interactions, to provide a better experience across customer touchpoints. Using analytics services, including Amazon Redshift (a cloud data warehouse), Amazon Glue (a serverless data integration service), and Amazon Athena (an interactive query service), Kayo analyses information like subscriber content preferences and streaming video performance in real-time to create a unified view of the customer, assess an individual’s engagement with the streaming platforms’ content, and adjust the content library to deliver a personalised menu of sporting events based on a viewer’s preferences. 

In 2020, the company launched BINGE, a new entertainment streaming service that is home to the world’s best shows and movies, leveraging the same technology platform as Kayo.

Using Amazon Personalize, a fully managed ML service that enables companies to create real-time personalised user recommendations at scale, BINGE recommends video content to each viewer based on their unique viewing patterns, including their preferred content genre.

On 18th March this year, Kayo and BINGE experienced a peak in demand on its platform with major events, including live AFL and NRL matches and superhero movie Zack Snyder’s Justice League airing simultaneously. With the support of AWS CloudFront (a fast content delivery network service), AWS Elemental Media Live and AWS Elemental Media Package (services for encoding live video, compressing it, and packaging it to different formats for viewing on multiple devices), as well as AWS Elemental Media Tailor (a service for inserting personalised advertising), the platform was able to handle more than 350,000 peak concurrent streams hitting more than six million hours of content across the four days of the peak.

Kayo Chief Executive, Julian Ogrin explained “there isn’t a sports streaming service with the live operations, capabilities, and depth and breadth of sport that Kayo offers.

“We are creating a whole new experience and changing the way people consume sports in Australia, providing what they want, when they want it, on any device, all from one place. AWS is helping us achieve this through the ability to leverage data and analytics to understand our customers better.

“With AWS, we have strong data that helps us more deeply understand consumers’ behaviours and what makes them tick. AWS also helps us deliver new features faster, so we can continually reinvent the viewing of the world’s best sports content for millions of customers.”

Karl Durrance, Director of Enterprise at AWS Australia, added “by collaborating with AWS, Kayo has created a streaming platform which meets the demands of delivering live and on-demand sports at scale.

“Kayo’s agile and data-driven approach uses the cloud to meet customer demand for multiple simultaneous streaming events. By analysing and correctly predicting customer needs using AWS services, they are able to deliver a seamless viewer experience and better engage with sports fans.”

For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform.