ECC Broadcast
Live broadcast of chess tournaments on a virtual chessboard.
- European Chess Championship
- Multiple boards
- 25 000 live viewers
Challange
What did the client expect?
Live broadcast
Blitz and rapid chess require extreme response times for live broadcasts.
Minimum delay
With moves made in seconds, the broadcast had to minimize latency.
Game replays
Recorded matches had to be made available to online spectators.
Approach
How did we work on the project?
The organizers of the European Chess Championship contacted us with a request to organize a broadcast of their 3-day-long live tournaments.
There were a total of 616 players participating, with a total of 25 000 viewers for three days. Our goal was to broadcast blitz and rapid chess games in real-time on a virtual chessboard, supporting massive traffic.
Since moves are usually made in a matter of seconds, limiting delay in transmission was the most crucial task. The main challenge was a quick transformation of movements we received into a format we could display. In the blitz part of the tournament, we were receiving moves from all chess boards as often as a few times per second. We had to show them in real-time.
We based our solution on a node and a cluster of servers. We used MongoDB for storing historical games. We created a set of monitoring tools to measure any delays or problems in transmission.
Whenever possible, we used simple solutions as possible. A large part of the site was based on HTML and JavaScript, to eliminate the burden on the server-side.
Results
What did we achieve?
The digital live broadcast platform was a successful attempt to broadcast blitz and rapid chess games online. Thousands of users from around the world flocked to our platform making it a popular chess event.
European Chess Championship
A renowned chess tournament
Multiple boards
Multiple boards
25 000 live viewers
Extensive audience in real time
Functionality
Key features
- live broadcast of moves on the virtual chessboard
- support of dozens of movements per second
- supports of a total of 25 000 viewers, spending on average 7 minutes on a site
- history of games and ability to view matches at your own pace, regardless of broadcast
- SSO Facebook login
