Sports & Entertainment Video Streaming Service

FuboTV – initially a small company from the US with an ambitious idea of becoming a nationwide football streaming service. The Client was planning to provide access to worldwide football leagues and matches from a bunch of sports channels via applications for smart TVs, tablets, mobile devices, and desktop computers.

Cooperation between fuboTV and Vakoms started in early 2014. The Client commissioned the following:

In the course of time, the Client decided to capture a greater market share by turning from mere football to a sports and entertainment streaming service for the whole family. Mainly, it was supposed to be done by adding sports and lifestyle channels.

Having received primary tasks, Vakoms software specialists chose technologies appropriate for the Customer and worked out a strategy of further joint collaboration. A dedicated team consisting of a project manager, web software development engineers, iOS and Android programmers, and QA specialists was formed.

Primarily, we had to develop fast, reliable and multifunctional website, as a powerful tool for watching streaming video. Our programmers, armed with JavaScript, took Node JS platform for backend, chose Angular JS framework for frontend, and immersed in software development process.

In a few months, we released the first version of the website. The service provided live access to 8 football channels – American, Latin American and Portuguese. Also, you could browse statistics of every game on automatically created dedicated pages and watch so-called Shows – video summary of matches. Apart from that, Vakoms developed a general chat, available to all users.

fuboTV offered 4 different plans on monthly or yearly basis. The subscription was organised via Stripe billing system.

Simultaneously, Vakoms software engineers finished the development of applications for Android mobile devices and iPhones. They allowed users to log in with an existing account or sign up via email, Facebook account or Google+, flip through the available streaming channels, select one and watch it live.

In spring 2015, the Client received investments and made a decision to expand the business. For that reason, the website and mobile applications were to be completely reworked. According to the plan Vakoms had to:

Squeezing the maximum out of JS technologies, we implemented new UI/UX, giving the website a fresh look and a new intuitive interface. Moreover, new architecture allowed us to put into place important software innovations. One of them – 2 weeks schedule, thanks to which users could find their favorite matches and not miss them.

Another thing is that now each game has its own automatically created page where you can browse statistics and watch live video.

But the main novelty is a DVR system. You can schedule an automatic video recording of the selected match and watch the game later, whenever convenient, not only live.

Besides we’ve developed different notifications and reminders on users’ emails. Also from now on, fuboTV has separate chats for different matches as well as other events.

The development of a second version of the website was finished in the early autumn, and a few month later around 20 new video channels were introduced to subscribers. This time not only football, but sports and lifestyle too.

That was a crucial moment. fuboTV transformed from a video service for soccer fans into an entertainment digital resource for whole families, where some can enjoy their favorite sports game and others can watch soap operas or informative-entertaining programs.

Consequently, a need emerged to devise and introduce more sophisticated subscription plans. Users should be able to choose which channels they need in addition to the basic package. But we faced a problem – Stripe, fuboTV’s billing system, didn’t support different types of subscriptions. That is why we decided to migrate to Recurly – a more flexible billing system.

The key point at this stage was to move the existing users, saving their current subscriptions. Our programmers brilliantly implemented that step by writing special migration scripts, operating with Javascript and Node.JS.

To sum up, Vakoms web engineers have written 47679 lines of code since the development of the website’s version 2 started.

Meanwhile, the mobile development division rolled out new applications for iOS and Android, which was done using Objective-C and Java respectively. Here are the main novelties:

Moreover, we’ve implemented a backward compatibility with the first versions of applications. Thanks to this change, now it is not necessary to update your old app – it uses new backend anyway.

At the end of 2016 – beginning of 2017 we rolled out the newest, third version of fuboTV service.

This upgrade introduced:

The main leitmotif is a preparation for delivering new video content from NBC and FOX Sports networks. Thus the website and apps received a new video player and got a better stability.

The website was redesigned and got a fresh look.

What’s more, in front end development we used Javascript language of the latest version (at that moment) and React framework. Deployed on Google Cloud Platform, the back end was also upgraded. Its new part was divided into separate components – microservices, coded on Go (golang). Each microservice solves its own task, e.g. listing, searching, filtration, providing information about channel, playing video, etc.

The new structure increases:

Over the 3 years of partnership, Vakoms has helped the Customer to become a leading soccer streaming service, and then to transform into a popular video streaming service for the whole family. FuboTV now delivers content from football, sports, entertainment, news and other networks. It is available on iOS and Android devices, as well as on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Chromecast digital players.

Upon launching the second version of the website, the Client had 16K paid subscribers and 170K users. As of Version 3 in January 2017 fuboTV has 65K paid subscribers and over 1.4M registered users.

What was s small startup is now recognized as a big company with huge prospects, and rizies vast investments, e.g. $12 million from TV giants 21st Century Fox and Sky within a $15 million B round.

Together with Vakoms, the Customer plans to continue refining the services and increase its presence on the sports and entertainment video streaming market.