Live Streaming for St Joseph’s College National Schools Festival 2015

The tournament for St Joseph’s College National Schools Rugby Festival took place over the third weekend of October (17 – 18). Thousands of people attended the event which is considered to be one of the best 15-a-side schools tournament in the UK. Sixteen schools from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales competed in the competition which is now in its 27th year and showcases the best in school boy rugby talent. With lots to do ‘off pitch’ with activities, stalls and refreshments, the event really is something for players and spectators to enjoy.

The whole tournament was live streamed as in previous years but this year we took a different approach making use of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Under the bonnet

We wanted to ensure that load time was consistent and surges in traffic would not affect the site’s performance. The website on which the tournament was streamed, live.stjos.co.uk was coded as static HTML, CSS and Javascript and loaded onto the AWS S3 storage service. Using AWS’ CloudFront service, we then set up a distribution to serve the files to the end users meaning that no web server was required nor autoscaling. Since the site would now be automatically globally distributed; when an end user made the request from the site it was served from a local ‘edge’ so load time was be uniform from anywhere in the world.

From past experience, we knew that traffic could be high at different times during the tournament so to counter any disruption in service due to high demand, we opted for the CloudFront service since we knew that it could handle pretty much any size of web traffic. We also wanted to ensure that parents of international students would have the best possible experience. As a result, the live streaming was a total success and as Mrs Danielle Clarke, the Principal at St Joseph’s College commented, “We have seen some fantastically entertaining rugby and are proud to report that over 17,000 people watched the Final live on-line through live-streaming.”

If you would like help of a similar nature, please give us a ring and we would be happy to discuss what we can do for your event.