Ably for Data Broadcast

Seamless live data delivery to millions of connected devices anywhere in the world

Keep your users informed in realtime, even when faced with unexpected surges or bad network connectivity. Using Ably’s APIs and SDKs you can broadcast realtime data with predictable low latency and guaranteed integrity.

Companies broadcasting realtime data with Ably

  1. Broadcasts live score updates from Australia in milliseconds to millions of global tennis fans.

  2. Powers realtime analysis on the impact of every feature on hundreds of business, product, and operational metrics.

  3. Initiates millions of VoIP calls and enables interactive events and webinars for large organizations around the world.

  4. Delivers realtime transport updates for 3 million Chicagoans each day.

Build dynamic, data-driven experiences with our versatile realtime infrastructure

Ably is used in a wide range of applications where the reliable delivery of live data, updates, and results is integral to the user experience. With Ably you can:

  • Power live data feeds such as sports scores, travel updates, stocks, currency or auction prices

  • Display aggregated live numerical data in dashboards, charts, leaderboards or poll results

  • Create entirely new data broadcast features, such as propagating feature flag changes in a CI/CD application

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Free yourself from infra limitations. Focus on your core app functionality instead.

Maintaining low latency and quality of service when broadcasting realtime updates at scale can slow down your development velocity. Our elastically scalable platform will handle anything you throw through it from day one. We handle the low-level realtime transport - offering predictably low latencies and hard guarantees across performance, data integrity, and reliability - so you get to focus on your core features.

Global low latency

All Ably customer apps run across 7 regions and 307 PoPs - providing resilience, reliability, and global low latencies. Ably guarantees median round trip latencies of ~65ms for the 99th percentile, so you can maintain the same quality of service regardless of where your users are.

When your user base grows, providing the same quality of service to all your users can become tricky. Customers in more distant regions will experience higher latencies, which will affect their user experience and ultimately your bottom line if your updates become too slow to be considered realtime.

Reliable QoS at Internet scale

Backed by a 99.999% uptime SLA, and a system designed with no single point of failure, your users' realtime experiences are never disrupted.

At risk of increasing service disruptions and negative customer experiences when you hit scale.

Effortless data integrity

Your updates are always delivered, in the exact order they are sent, and they are delivered exactly once. Thanks to Ably's message delivery, message ordering, and idempotent publishing guarantees.

Failed or incorrect message delivery can cause user dissatisfaction and complaints, or can entirely cripple the functioning of your application.

Don't fear the traffic spike

Easily handle unpredictable and rapidly changing numbers of devices connecting to your updates. Ably is designed to absorb very large and unexpected spikes, with autoscaling systems that actively manage capacity. No need to pre-provision on your part.

An unexpected surge can take your entire application down and create a nightmare for your users, your developers, and your business teams alike.

Lower your total cost of ownership

Ably is a serverless solution and only charges for what you actually use. On average, our customers reported $300k+ savings in cloud costs in just the first year and $500k reduced build cost.

The ongoing costs of managing and debugging as you scale and the stress of incident response alerts at 4 am place significant burdens on many companies.

Build realtime updates into your application faster with our building blocks

PUB/SUB MESSAGING

Distribute events to millions of subscribers over channels that support multiplexing with Ably’s feature-rich pub/sub APIs. We ensure delivery of the right message to the right client in realtime.

CONNECTION MANAGEMENT

Changing from mobile to wifi, going into tunnels and bad networks are frequent mobile UI problems. Ably keeps state and retries connection every 15 seconds for two minutes, for a seamless user experience.

SSE and Raw HTTP Streaming API

Ably provides an SSE and raw HTTP streaming API for cases where using a full Ably Realtime client library is impractical. It can be a more memory-efficient solution for simple read-only applications.

REWIND

A client can receive up to 100 messages from the last 72 hours prior to their connection. Updates can be made available to new users the moment the page loads, with fewer API calls, lower latency, and lower bandwidth usage.

STATE PERSISTENCE

Last state on the channel can be stored for a long amount of time, so a client can sync on reconnect, even after more time has passed.

PRESENCE

Presence enables you to be aware of other clients that are currently “present” on a channel. For example, it can be used to start a broadcast only when enough devices have come online.

Maintain a modular stack

Ably can be integrated with many other protocols, databases, clouds and services, so you can use the tools that suit your growth plans best. We also provide managed integrations with a series of cloud services.

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The power of high-ratio fan-out at your fingertips

Ably gives you the power of realtime data transport through serverless pub/sub event streaming, delivered at the edge over WebSockets.

How NASCAR delivers realtime data to fans around the world

Each NASCAR Cup Series race generates 1.3 TB of high-frequency data, which is processed then streamed in realtime to fans. In this interview Chad Larter, Senior Director of Technical Operations for NASCAR talks through how NASCAR tackles this large-scale realtime data challenge with Ably.

Read the case study

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Our formal evaluation process and double load testing proved that Ably was the only platform that could meet our very challenging performance targets. They delivered without a hitch in 2018 and we look forward to working with them again next year.

Jeremy KeechPMO Manager