The video game live streaming and eSports market has grown rapidly over the past few years, with 50 million global eSports viewers, 2.7 billion gamers worldwide, and tens of billions of hours of streaming content watched. 

This market offers many opportunities for savvy game publishers and brands to reach their target audiences with non-traditional approaches such as sponsoring eSports competitions. A lack of reliable eSports and live stream data, however, made it difficult to make the right decisions.

Challenges/Goals

Stream Hatchet was founded to fill this analytic gap in the market. Its goals were to: 

• Help companies analyze eSports data so they can understand how they’re doing and ways they can optimize time and resources
• Become an industry-trusted source for audience analytics at the top events in eSports 
• Offer real-time and historical live streaming data to analyze trends and performance across all genres, games, events, and channels

Technology Requirements 

Stream Hatchet's customers are the biggest companies in the eSports industry: game publishers, eSports organizers, and other brands.

Albert Alemany, Co-Founder and CTO, and the Stream Hatchet team needed a database solution capable of working with thousands of time series data points in complex multi-gigabyte aggregated queries. Analytics speed was the top priority for the platform, as queries were taking more than a minute.

Both real-time and historical data were needed to provide the full context of the live streams and eSports events. The data ingestion pipeline included manual metadata input, third-party fact tables, and automated systems. Ideally, all this data would live in the same datastore to reduce infrastructure complexity and improve performance. 

The database had to support SQL so Stream Hatchet wouldn't need to rewrite the entire backend or APIs. It also needed to support real-time and time series analytics with ultra-fast performance. 

Why SingleStore/Solution

Stream Hatchet experimented with many database technologies and found that SingleStore Helios exceeded its technology requirements. This cloud database as a service delivered the real-time query speed Stream Hatchet wanted while eliminating the need for multiple purpose-built databases to support its required functionality.

Stream Hatchet migrated all of its eSports data to SingleStore Helios. With SQL Wire compliance, it only took two months to bring this solution fully into production. With this unified database designed for fast analytics on any data set, anywhere, customers can now get real-time insights on eSports data to inform their decision-making. 

Outcomes

“Before SingleStore, we had to look at our data from the surface because our back end didn’t allow us to go deeper. Now we can crunch the data in different ways in real time that allow our users to extract insights and see things they couldn’t see before," said Alemany.

10X Faster Query Performance + 2X Faster Report Generation = Better Partnerships + Expanded Audience Reach

With SingleStore, Stream Hatchet customers are now enjoying 10X faster query performance and generating reports twice as fast as before. Data science teams now have increased visibility into their data, leading to greater speed and agility. They’re able to optimize league performance, make better influencer partnerships, explore macro trends in live streaming, and expand their audience reach. 

Real-Time Analytics with Minute-by-Minute Granularity 

With SingleStore, Stream Hatchet now builds minute-by-minute granularity into its eSports data. Customers can drill down into this information to see what specific channels are doing at specific times and view trends in context to understand spikes in viewership. This time series data is processed quickly and efficiently, eliminating any delay that stands between brands and critical esports insights. 

Powering Multiple Business Units for <$400/month

Now that Stream Hatchet has its eSports use case fully in production and meeting performance requirements, the team wants to expand SingleStore Helios usage to other lines of business. This cloud-native database solution is built for seamless scaling and ultra-fast analytics, so it’s a powerful foundation to build upon.

Simplified its Infrastructure with a Unified Database

Stream Hatchet relied on multiple purpose-built databases and related services for its eSports analytics before adopting SingleStore Helios. The complex infrastructure cost the team significant time and resources in maintaining these systems. With SingleStore, Stream Hatchet can focus on iterating its platform and exploring new ways to serve its customers.

SingleStore is helping companies compete and win across all verticals. Learn more →