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As your user base expands, so does the volume and variety of push notifications you need to send. Whether it’s transactional alerts, updates, or personalized messages, publishing notifications for thousands - or even millions - of users can quickly become a bottleneck. The more you grow, the more important it becomes to have a scalable, efficient push strategy.

At Ably's February fan engagement event, Sam Renouf, CEO of the Professional Triathletes Organisation (PTO), captured the essence of impactful fan engagement with an observation about motorsports: Sam's insight points to a transformation across sports, and fan experiences more generally: that effective engagement now depends on meaningful realtime data storytelling.

Fan engagement strategies are evolving rapidly. But how do organizations ensure they are delivering realtime data with real meaning to their customers? As a veteran of the sports media industry with 35 years of experience at Deltatre, Carlo De Marchis (A Guy With a Scarf) recently gave a keynote at Ably’s fan engagement summit in February, and explored exactly this question - what should companies actually be trying to achieve when building a fan engagement strategy? His answer was concise.

High-scale, high-frequency messaging and burst activity can lead to significant costs and performance challenges for realtime applications. To help with this, we’ve introduced server-side batching and conflated subscriptions—two powerful optimizations in Ably Pub/Sub that significantly reduce message count, lower bandwidth usage, and optimize processing overhead. These features allow you to process high-frequency updates more efficiently without sacrificing accuracy, reliability, or latency.