'What's the score?': A first look at sports live data feed services

Pengfei Wang, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The significant interest that sports fans show for live game events, coupled with the major relevance that such information has for the online betting industry, singles out the live sports data as 'the most important secondary information in the world.' As a result, a set of specialized - sports data feed service - providers, has emerged. In this paper, we devise a methodology to evaluate such services in terms of speed and accuracy, at scale. We provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first measurement study of such services. By obtaining a direct access to the data feed of a leading sports data provider, we manage to assess the impact of different entities present in the data delivery chain. By measuring National Basketball Association (NBA) and English Premier League (EPL) live games from 40 sports websites, associated with 3 different data feed providers, we find that: (i) the direct data feed that we evaluated is systematically faster than a live cable TV broadcast provider, (ii) the variance of delays significantly increases once the feed gets redistributed by sports websites, and (iii) there exists an order-of-magnitude discrepancy in terms of delay, accuracy, and data diversity among different providers.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationINFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages220-225
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781538659793
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 6 2018
Event2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops, INFOCOM 2018 - Honolulu, United States
Duration: Apr 15 2018Apr 19 2018

Publication series

NameINFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops

Other

Other2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops, INFOCOM 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHonolulu
Period4/15/184/19/18

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Optimization
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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