Fantasy Football Fix
Powering instantaneous realtime sport stats for Fantasy Premier League players
About Fantasy Football Fix
Fantasy Football Fix is a fantasy sports site that uses the world's most powerful predictive fantasy football algorithm to make informed transfer decisions and increase its users performance using live set of statistics. By uploading their Fantasy Premier League squad, players get exposed to a whole new world of predictive live statistics and next generation features to help them score more points and get ahead of the game using second screen.
Fantasy Football Fix Use Case
Fantasy Football Fix provides live set of statistics to thousands of players, serving premium realtime features using Ably’s Pub/Sub messaging to organize the messaging traffic into named channels and deliver predictive game statistics to its audience.
As the updates take place during a live game, every individual action from the game is collected, packaged and distributed by sports data provider Opta and used by the powerful predictive algorithm of Fantasy Football Fix. Once the live set of statistics is available it is delivered in realtime to the premium fantasy sports players. Performance and low latency are paramount in ensuring this flow of sports data stays scalable and limitless using Ably’s reliable realtime API.
Providing realtime updates only during live sports events at the moment, the team is looking into expanding its realtime usage by introducing chat based features and additional realtime web updates using Ably to enhance the players experience.
The Ably Solution
Simple API and Pub/Sub messaging enables smooth realtime implementation
Initially set up using a non-realtime service, the team was using polling mechanism to retrieve sports data however this did not prove to be the best solution as they would typically need to poll data every minute, while the players were expecting instant realtime notifications once a goal was scored. Additional overhead was also created on its servers as well due to the usage of the polling mechanism even when there were no game updates available.
This led to looking for a realtime solution such as Pub/Sub messaging and started exploring usage of Django channels which proved to be complex and time consuming to apply. The goal was to ensure simple implementation and technical support in order to minimize the complexity of integrating channels with the predictive algorithm. Due to the simple realtime API and technical documentation of Ably, the team was able to get up and running in 10 minutes without the need of a deeply technical expertise which helped save time and simplify the transition to a sustainable realtime solution.
Message History & guaranteed delivery ensure messages get delivered
Due to unstable networks, lots of the players were experiencing connectivity issues which was causing loss of message updates that never get delivered. Combining the reliable message ordering solution of Ably with Message history, the recent updates are stored for up to 2 minutes and retrieved once the players are re-connected automatically which helps resume the connection state and deliver all live stats and messages in the right order which made a tremendous difference in not having to engineer a solution but take advantage of the existing unique features of Ably.
The live stats of Fantasy Football fix are also available on mobile apps (iOS & Android) where the team is also looking at Ably as a solution for realtime data delivery as Apple Push Notification Service currently does not provide any guaranteed delivery and ordering functionality which is a pain point that is crucial for enabling the delivery of realtime live statistics to its players.
The ability to guarantee the message delivery and ordering of our live stats for our players is crucial for our success. Ably’s unique realtime features proved to be rock solid in ensuring reliable realtime data delivery, freeing us to focus on introducing new game features.
Fantasy Football Fix relies on Ably for
-
See how
Group and one-to-one channels
We provide an unlimited number of channels for dedicated one-to-one or group chats.
-
See how
Connection state recovery
When devices lose their connection, they don't need to lose message continuity and data integrity.
-
See how
Device and user presence status
Be notified when users and devices go online or offline.
-
See how
Realtime user state
Know when users are typing, or get updates in realtime as a users GPS position changes.
-
See how
Chat history
Use our message history to persist conversations or a user's state such as their GPS location.
-
See how
Direct message routing
We ensure users in the same region are routed using the most efficient path, which means it's fast.
-
See how
Guaranteed delivery
Uniquely we guarantee all recipients receive messages 100% of the time. Build chat you can rely on.
-
See how
Encryption
End-to-end encryption ensures your messages are secure. Not even we can decrypt them.
-
See how
Token-based access control
Channel access control is managed by tokens you issue, so your chats are private and secure.
-
See how
Mobile Push Notifications
Alert users with a native OS notification even when they are not using your app.
-
See how
Consistent client libraries on every platform
Simplify development with our API consistent libraries on every popular platform.
-
See how
Privacy and compliance
We are a registered ICO processor. For organizations wishing to keep their data in a region, we can offer that