Sportal.com -- one of the largest international online sports portals -- won the franchise for the official site of the Euro2000 soccer tournament. The site would broadcast live text commentary and scores for all the games in five European languages.

Whichever way Sportal did its calculations, broadcasting the European Soccer Championships to fans across the world was going to require scalable new technology. The company was going to deliver real-time sports commentary and results to very large numbers of people.

In October 1999, Sportal approached IST to produce a Java applet front end for a system that would broadcast sports scores and commentary in real time over the Internet.

Soon the scope of the work grew to meet the real challenge. What was needed was DeltaStream, with its Web infrastructure for scalable, fast distribution of content to applets on the desktop; Web-based servers for inputting editorial and statistical content; and the Java front end, a flexible multiapplet design that could be customized by graphics designers, not programmers.

Traditional HTML refresh polling -- with up to 30 seconds delay -- is not real-time. It's not even close. Sportal's no-compromise requirement was for continuous connections to every desktop -- no pauses, no dependence on network traffic, no transmission breaks. Once customers connected to the Java applet front end, they would remain connected. And that meant a system that could easily maintain continuous connections across the Internet to half a million users - DeltaStream.

The system was successfully put together in time to enable UEFA and Sportal to broadcast live commentary for every match in Euro2000 in up to seven languages to a worldwide Java internet audience. It was also used by Yahoo for their HTML based live coverage of this festival of football.

In their press release at the end of the competition UEFA and Sportal claimed 128 million page impressions for Euro2000. One million of these were to the DeltaStream powered MatchTracker. 600,000 people watched the matches, the most popular being the semi-final between Italy and The Netherlands which attracted 100,000 people.

We have gathered together all the match statistics, group tables, results, teams, and a 10x real time MatchTracker replay of all the games. Click here to enjoy.

If you would like to know more: See the Sun Case Study on IST and Sportal.com or contact our Sales Desk (email: sales@ist.co.uk)