The MEGOGO media service has issued an official statement regarding the problems with the broadcast during the Euro 2024 match between Romania and Ukraine.
"Dear friends, the IT team and sports editorial staff of the MEGOGO media service have conducted a detailed analysis of the failure that occurred during the broadcast of the Romania vs. Ukraine match at EURO 2024.
The quality of live broadcasts is the highest priority for the service, and the built-in sports streaming system is technically extremely complex and is constantly being improved to withstand high loads. How it works:
1. Signal reception and delivery. We receive signals from stadiums and rings around the world via satellite. To the stability of the system, we use a primary, backup, and additional satellite. We also have two geographically independent reception sites, between which we automatically switch. Usually, we have one main satellite in operation, but during the war in Ukraine, we use two backup satellites for greater reliability.
2. Signal processing. The signal is delivered to the studio in its original quality, where production, voice-over and broadcasting take place, including adaptations for people with hearing and visual impairments. A team of nearly 100 people is involved in each sports program, and our IP network allows us to work from different parts of the country, regardless of alarms and power outages.
3. Program creation. The finished program is transferred to our servers, which form a TV channel or object. At this stage, we can create a broadcasting grid; add graphic elements to the program; QR code to raise funds for the army and, of course, advertising.
4. Content delivery network (CDN) and transcoding. During transcoding, we convert the program into several quality versions, which allows our application to adapt to the speed of the Internet and users to receive a signal on any device. And the main task of a CDN is to deliver the signal in optimal quality even in unstable Internet conditions.
Over the past year alone, MEGOGO has broadcast more than 3,000 live sports broadcasts, 99.8% of which were held without technical problems.
Production of the broadcast of the Romania vs Ukraine match on June 17.
The reason for the technical problems was stormy weather conditions in Kyiv. It all started with the interruption of the broadcast with a black screen due to a severe thunderstorm and heavy rain, which made it impossible to receive the signal on the main and backup satellites - a completely unique situation when two satellites failed at the same time - switching to the third took 40 seconds.
At 17:16, users, observing problems with broadcasting and trying to get a signal, began to reconnect to the broadcast, which led to a massive avalanche of requests on many service systems. There was an increase in the number of requests to the CDN abnormally higher than the predicted maximum for this match. As a result, the content delivery subsystem failed. It was stabilized and resumed at around 17:50, at the end of the second half of the match.
At the same time, the TV signals provided by MEGOGO to local channels of Suspilne Broadcasting and the United News telethon were available and the football game continued, as they did not depend on the MEGOGO content delivery network.
The media service team works in Kyiv, in particularly difficult conditions of martial law, including in the mode of saving electricity on generators due to the risk of blackouts. Unfortunately, this time the disaster caused circumstances that were technically impossible to foresee and quickly eliminate.
We understand how disappointing this event was for the fans and for us as well. We apologize once again. We are constantly working on the quality of our broadcasts and have never had a single failure for the same reason. Every time a technical problem occurs, the team analyzes it in detail and takes all necessary measures to prevent it from happening again.
Since Monday, the MEGOGO support team has been working in an enhanced mode to process user requests. We are grateful to everyone who treated the situation with understanding and humor - we see that we have inspired Ukrainians to create memes," the MEGOGO press service said on its Facebook page.
