Case Study: Stadion achieves sub-0.5s realtime live updates at global scale with Ably

Live updates for world-class sports clubs

Stadion is a digital-sport innovation company whose platform (and live-blogging tool Lively) powers real‑time coverage for clubs and sports bodies, including customers like Manchester City and Newcastle United. Their engineering challenge was delivering ultra-low-latency, globally reliable live updates—targeting under 0.5 seconds and no downtime—to compete with major sports media and serve millions of fans simultaneously, so they integrated Stadion/Lively with Ably’s Pub/Sub realtime messaging.

Ably provided a globally distributed, scalable realtime backbone (Pub/Sub, connection state recovery, mobile/browser push, and consistent SDKs) with a 100% uptime guarantee, removing WebSocket load‑balancer limits and easing Stadion’s scaling concerns. The result: instant, demo‑worthy live updates across unlimited users and devices, reliably delivered in under 0.5 seconds (faster than BBC and Sky), enabling Stadion to focus on product development while confidently serving millions of fans.

Stadion

Lee Cook

Founder and CEO