FanHero

FanHero uses Cloudflare Waiting Room to elevate user experience and protect multi-million dollar contracts

Founded in 2016, FanHero is a white label video platform that allows customers to deliver and monetize content around the world. Whether a customer has on-demand or live video content, FanHero provides an all-in-one solution to host, manage, and distribute video for a variety of industries, including sports, corporate events, educational content, and more. Due to the nature of their product, it is important that FanHero delivers a fast and reliable user experience for their customers so their events can run smoothly for - at times - hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Challenge:

FanHero’s service is all about availability and accessibility. Humberto Farias, FanHero’s CEO, says, “We don't have a few minutes to mitigate a problem. If you're watching a live event, and you can't access the platform for as little as a few seconds, it is incredibly frustrating for customers.”

FanHero sought out Cloudflare because of their unique mix of performance, security, and reliability. According to Farias, “We were looking for a solution that was a one-stop shop in terms of having everything in one place.”

Cloudflare Waiting Room helps FanHero manage sudden surges in viewers

While looking for a platform that met its needs, FanHero learned about Waiting Room. Waiting Room is a Cloudflare solution that provides a virtual queue, controlling the rate at which visitors access a website.

FanHero tries to predict the number of viewers that a particular event will attract, but turnout occasionally catches them by surprise. Farias says, “If we are hosting a game that is very popular, and we end up getting hundreds of thousands more users than anticipated, we know that our infrastructure will have time to scale thanks to Waiting Room, and our customers will ultimately have a good experience.”

Even if FanHero is not surprised by the viewership of an event, sudden surges in traffic can tax the platform. Most viewers will try to sign on right before a game or other event will start, requiring FanHero to suddenly process an influx of payment transactions. While FanHero’s systems can handle the surge, their third-party payment partners do not always have the same capacity.

This can create latency on the platform, which reflects poorly on FanHero. With Waiting Room, FanHero can manage the number of users submitting a payment at one time to ensure that all transactions go through smoothly and no systems are overwhelmed. According to Farias, “Cloudflare Waiting Room provides that layer of protection to ensure that customers ultimately have a good experience.”

FanHero has used Waiting Room for dozens of events and has already seen the benefits. A recent event had 375,000 visitors from 50 different countries, and 100,000 of those visitors consumed paid content. Without Waiting Room, the surge in requests right before the event could have created a challenge for FanHero’s payment processing vendors. Waiting Room ensured that the infrastructure of FanHero’s payment processing vendors had time to autoscale in order to deliver an exceptional experience to the hundreds of thousands of viewers who wanted to watch and enjoy the game, even as their competitors' systems crashed under demand.

“Waiting Room is fantastic because it allows us to scale while also providing that extra layer of protection to ensure that customers ultimately have a great user experience,” says Farias. “They were able to experience the passion and excitement of a live game, even through the limitations of today’s remote world.”

Cloudflare Waiting Room ensures a positive viewer experience

Waiting Room gives FanHero confidence that they can provide a positive experience for viewers and meet contractual obligations. According to Farias, “Our SLA is not in hours, it’s in minutes. Downtime is catastrophic, not just from a reputation standpoint but also from a monetary standpoint. It is even worse from a user experience standpoint. Cloudflare Waiting Room helps us to avoid catastrophe and ensures that we don’t lose multi-million dollar contracts.”