Sneak Preview: Maximizing QoE With Resilient, Scalable Sports Streaming Infrastructure
On Tuesday, November 10, ex-Norsk CMO Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen will moderate the Streaming Media Connect panel Unbreakable: Maximizing QoE With Resilient, Scalable Sports Streaming Infrastructure. High-performance, redundant, and resilient pipelines are critical to successful, mission-critical sports streams. This panel of seasoned sports streamers explores how sports streaming platforms leverage infrastructure designed to withstand the bursty demands of live sporting events without buckling under pressure. This session covers scaling strategies and failover systems that will keep your high-stakes streams running when your fan base surges in the moments that matter most.
Confirmed panelists include:
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Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen is the former CMO of Norsk, which builds highly scalable, highly resilient live workflows for some of the world's largest organizations. From 2004 to July 2022, Eric was VP and editor-in-chief of Streaming Media magazine and StreamingMedia.com. A technology and entertainment journalist for more than 30 years, his work has appeared in the Village Voice, MTV.com, Blurt, Harp, and Paste, as well as EMedia and EventDV.
"Sports streaming infrastructure needs to be rock-solid, resilient, and include monitoring tools that allow issues to not only be detected but solved before the audience even notices," Schumacher-Rasmussen says. "Increasingly, that means leveraging automation, either deterministic or via agentic AI that switches feeds or outputs based on criteria that are established long before the event begins. Where things get really hairy is in the seams between systems—the origin, the CDN handoff, the ad insertion tech, or the player—and so end-to-end visibility is crucial to make sure the viewer never experiences a degradation in QoE."
Juan Pablo Saibene (a.k.a. JP) is a media technology executive and entrepreneur who, for over 15 years, has been a trusted technical partner to the platforms shaping the future of streaming. As CEO and Co-Founder of Qualabs, he leads a specialized team that bridges business strategy with deep technical execution in mission-critical streaming systems, architecting and scaling the infrastructure behind some of the industry's most demanding live and on-demand experiences. Qualabs' approach is built on depth over scale: technical judgment and specialization over headcount, with sports, operational optimization and content creation emerging as the company's next frontier in streaming infrastructure.
“Resilience is designed before the event, not bought during it,” Saibene says. “The failure I see most often is not capacity, it is observability: the stream is degraded long before anyone can name the layer. You do not scale live operations by putting more eyes on more multiviews and dashboards. You scale it by making the system raise its own hand. That is why we now run an agentic ops copilot next to our operations engineers on real events, keeping detection deterministic and using AI for root cause and for turning every post mortem into a pattern the system keeps.”
Dennis LeMire is Director of Global Stream Operations at FloSports, where he leads the teams responsible for delivering more than 55,000 live sporting events annually across more than 20 sports. He has played a key role in scaling FloSports’ live streaming operations during a period of significant growth, building a distributed 24/7 support model across teams in Austin, Texas; Waterloo, Canada; and the Philippines to ensure consistent stream quality across a wide range of production environments. With nearly a decade of experience in live streaming and sports media, including roles at NBC Sports and Trackwrestling, LeMire specializes in scaling resilient, high-volume operations that maintain uptime across highly variable and decentralized workflows. His work focuses on optimizing reliability in lean operating environments, navigating the complexities of diverse encoder types, ingest methods, and on-site production conditions.
“Everyone understands the importance of resilient infrastructure and failover, but QoE starts much earlier,” LeMire says. “It starts with testing, training, preparing partners, and giving people the tools and processes to succeed. Resilience is people + process + technology working together. Automation gives us the scale to detect problems early, while humans provide the context to understand what those problems mean to the customer or viewer. I’m looking forward to discussing how those pieces work together to protect QoE when live sports are most demanding."
Brandon Ross is Interconnection Consultant at DE-CIX and a veteran network engineering and architecture expert with over 30 years of experience designing, building, and optimizing service provider and enterprise networks worldwide. He has held senior technical leadership roles at Accelecom, WeWork, Comcast, MindSpring, Myriad360, NetRail, and Sockeye Networks, and spent nearly a decade as Founder, CEO, and Chief Network Architect of Network Utility Force, a boutique consultancy delivering high-impact network solutions for major telecoms, cloud providers, data centers, and enterprises.
“Live sports is the ultimate stress test for streaming infrastructure: millions of viewers arrive at the same moment, and there's no second take,” Ross says. “Redundancy alone isn't enough. Resilience starts with how and where your network interconnects with the eyeball networks that carry your streams. In this panel I'm looking forward to discussing how direct, diverse interconnection at the edge reduces latency, avoids congestion, and keeps quality of experience high when it matters most.”
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