Live Events Company Resolves Streaming Video and Ticket Sales Performance Issues
Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CUSTOMER TYPE: Concert event manager
INDUSTRY: Live events
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
- Poor quality live streaming video concerts
- Unacceptable customer experience buying tickets during peak demand
SOLUTION
- LiveNX single-pane-of-glass network performance monitoring to detect and correct WAN performance issues
BUSINESS RESULTS
- Resolved video quality issues during live concerts
- Eliminated poor transaction response times during peak ticketing demand
CHALLENGE
Over the course of a decade, this live events company has expanded its ticketing, concert promotion, and venue operation business across 37 countries to serve 530 million users, 26,000 annual events, and 75 festivals. But not without growing pains.
As they grew operations, the company began to experience performance problems when tickets for an especially popular act went on sale. As they introduced real-time streaming video for live concert events, video and audio quality and reliability issues surfaced. It became apparent that the existing WAN infrastructure was no longer adequate to the task of supporting the always-on, always-connected generation. The network team initiated the search for a solution with the availability, performance, and resilience to keep up with their growth.
SOLUTION
Impressed by its capabilities and track-record, the team selected Cisco’s software-defined wide-area network offering, IWAN, on which to build the infrastructure of their new WAN. They were confident that the solution would ensure high link availability and reliability, two key performance indicators that were critical to deliver quality real-time video and a high-volume of retail transactions, services that formed the backbone of their business.
After evaluating the alternatives, the team also adopted the Cisco-recommended management solution for IWAN from LiveAction, LiveNX. The intuitive network performance management solution features a single-pane-of-glass view into the state of the network using color-coded indicators (green, amber, red) to instantly alert network engineers to problems. Without leaving the interface, engineers can drill down into the data to identify the root cause of a problem and resolve it.
RESULTS
After deployment of IWAN with LiveNX, the network team saw immediate improvement in the quality of real-time concert video connections and a significant drop in complaints as customer satisfaction increased. The improved customer experience also extended to online ticketing during peak surges in demand as transaction response times improved and the number of completed transactions increased.
“With LiveNX, we have a sense of comfort that our team can quickly address network issues during stressful peak busy hour network traffic conditions.”
– Senior Network Engineer for a Live Events Company
About LiveAction®
LiveAction provides end-to-end visibility of network and application performance from a single pane of glass. We provide enterprises with confidence that the network is meeting business objectives, full network visibility for better decisions, and reduced cost to operate the network.
