Second Screening That Keeps Fans On Your Platform
Use PubNub’s real-time platform to power second screening experiences—live chat, stats, polls, commerce—without building fragile, event-driven infrastructure in-house.
Key Benefits
Reduce Event-Day Risk
Trusted real-time infrastructure for spikes.
Benefit
Design for championship-level traffic without over-architecting. PubNub’s global, real-time network, access control, and moderation tools help you avoid outages and brand risk when millions engage at once.
Monetize Second Screen Moments
Create new inventory around live moments.
Benefit
Inject shoppable prompts, sponsored trivia, and branded predictions directly into second screen flows. Use PubNub Functions to trigger context-aware offers the instant a key play or storyline unfolds.
Predictable Cost, Clear Path to Scale
Forecastable economics as engagement grows.
Benefit
Align pricing with business drivers like active users and events. Start with a single property, validate ROI, then extend PubNub across leagues, shows, or regions with a consistent economic model.
Your Fans Are Watching You—On Someone Else’s Platform
During your biggest moments, fans are on social feeds, betting apps, and group chats you don’t control.
You fund the content, but third parties capture the engagement, data, and incremental revenue.
Without a real-time second screening strategy, every live event widens that gap—and entrenches competitors as the default fan destination.
Second Screening: Build on PubNub vs. Generic Options
Reduce time-to-market, operational risk, and TCO compared with DIY builds or broad, non-media-focused communication stacks.
PubNub vs. In‑House DIY
Avoid multi-quarter builds, brittle event infrastructure, and constant firefighting. PubNub delivers proven real-time rails your teams configure, not construct.
PubNub vs. Twilio-Style APIs
Twilio excels at generic messaging. PubNub focuses on high-scale, data-rich interactions ideal for sports, OTT, and live events.
CASE STUDY
How PubNub Underpins Interactive Second Screening Experiences
Media and sports innovators use PubNub to synchronize live video with chat, stats, polls, and watch parties—keeping fans engaged on owned properties and opening new sponsorship and commerce inventory without rewriting infrastructure for every event.
Get an ROI & Architecture Review for Second Screening
Frequently Asked Questions
What is second screening in sports and media?
Second screening is when viewers use a phone, tablet, or laptop while watching a primary screen. For sports, news, and live shows, it’s where fans chat, check stats, vote, shop, and follow social commentary in real time. PubNub gives you the infrastructure to host those behaviors inside your own apps instead of losing them to third-party platforms.
How does PubNub support real-time second screen experiences?
PubNub provides a managed real-time platform—pub/sub messaging, presence, storage, and edge functions—that powers live chat, synchronized stats, watch parties, polls, predictions, and commerce triggers. You integrate via SDKs, configure rules, and your teams orchestrate interactive experiences without building or running low-level real-time infrastructure.
Why not build a second screen platform in-house?
DIY builds often look attractive until you factor in hidden TCO: months of engineering time, 24/7 incident coverage, capacity planning for peak events, compliance reviews, and ongoing feature requests from content teams. PubNub offloads the hardest parts—global scale, reliability, moderation, and data plumbing—so your roadmap stays focused on content and monetization, not infrastructure.
Can PubNub handle major live events and traffic spikes?
PubNub is designed for highly spiky, event-driven workloads such as sports finals, reality show voting, and award shows. Our global architecture, presence, and channel model let you fan out engagement across millions of concurrent users while maintaining low latency. You avoid scrambling to re-architect just to survive a single marquee night.
How does PubNub help with moderation and brand safety?
Use PubNub Functions and BizOps Workspace to filter profanity, hate speech, and spam in near real time, plus manage mute lists and channel rules without new code deployments. That keeps live chats, predictions, and fan conversations aligned with your brand, sponsor expectations, and regulatory obligations.
What does a typical rollout of second screening with PubNub look like?
Most organizations start with one flagship use case—a live game companion app, a tentpole show, or a single league. Phase 1: pilot core features (chat, stats, polls) and validate engagement. Phase 2: add monetization formats and deeper analytics. Phase 3: standardize PubNub as the real-time layer across shows, leagues, and regions, so teams reuse patterns instead of rebuilding.
