The WICC, developed by Relevent Sports Group (RSG), brought together four championship-winning teams from around the world: Olympique Lyonnais, Houston Dash and FC Barcelona joined hosts Portland Thorns for the tournament in Portland’s Providence Park. Portland Thorns beat Olympique Lyonnais 1-0 in the final to be crowned the 2021 WICC Champions. The competition has a substantial following in China.

“The WICC is already hugely popular, and we are keen to bring the WICC to wider audiences and contribute to the growth of women’s football globally,” said Matt Kontos, MD of the ICC. “Providing timely delivery onto the social media networks audiences use is a central part of that drive. Caton demonstrated to us how they could supply social media-ready and mobile-friendly services which still retained the excitement of being live. On match days, they delivered exactly what they promised.”

The CatonNet Video Platform provides broadcast-grade media transmission services with points of presence in more than 60 countries. For the WICC it established a path from BT Tower in London to Hong Kong and the Sina Weibo platform for onward distribution into mainland China.

The circuits used Caton Transport Protocols (CTP) which provide highly reliable transmission, using proprietary algorithms and dynamic forward error correction to assure quality, performance and reliability. CVP also provides near real-time transcoding, ensuring bitrate and format compatibility when transmissions are fed to Sina Weibo. Transmission tunnels are AES-265 encrypted, and streams and data are individually sliced and encapsulated with CTP’s proprietary technologies.

Jason Ho, senior business development director at Caton Technology, added “Content owners, producers and sports federations are increasingly looking to manage their intellectual property all the way to consumers, so there is a fast-growing demand for secure, low-latency, high quality transmission paths. CVP not only reaches all the major markets around the world, it also adds value to the transmission by providing transcoding on the fly, so streams arrive at the content distribution networks ready for immediate delivery.”