A company spokesperson told iTWire in response to queries that it was pleased with the way the opening weekend of the RWC had gone. The tournament kicked off in Japan on Friday and seven matches have now been completed. The final will be on 2 November.
"It was a great weekend of sport on Kayo with AFL and NRL finals, the Singapore Grand Prix, tennis, MLB plus plenty of football and cricket, in addition to the RWC," the spokesperson said.
"From Thursday to Sunday we delivered 224 live feeds and over 600 hours of live streaming. Importantly, the streaming performance was extremely high with minimal interruptions."
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The spokesperson added: "As you know, the streaming ecosystem is extremely complex. From time to time streaming services will experience intermittent issues and that is why we have an advanced 24/7 monitoring system to provide the best performance possible. If an issue is identified, we work with our partners to quickly resolve [the issues].
"On Sunday afternoon there was an isolated issue with one of the network providers that impacted a very small number of customers. Once identified we worked with our partners to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."
The streaming of a major tournament like the RWC also focuses attention on the quality of broadband available in Australia. The last time streaming of a major tournament was attempted it did not end well: this was the last World Cup Football tournament when Optus tried to stream the entire tournament but ended up depending on SBS to handle the job through conventional TV for the most part.
The Kayo spokesperson said the Kayo service had been built to work with the Internet speeds in Australia.
"We have built Kayo to adapt as much as possible to the range of Internet speeds Australians experience at home and on the go," the spokesperson said.
"We offer a HD and SD stream that a user can self-manage in the ‘Quality options’ to best suit their Internet plan. By default, the video quality will be set to Automatic so that the user’s player will detect the best video quality based on their Internet speed."
The spokesperson said that sport on Kayo was best experienced in full HD (1080p), which requires an Internet connection of at least 7.5Mbps.
"Users will still get a HD picture (720p) with speeds above 4Mbps. Below 4Mbps, the quality will be an SD quality image. We have no plans at this stage to offer a 4K stream."