“What’s the Score?” : A First Look at Sports Live Data Feed Services

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.