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Today's fans crave realtime engagement. They want to feel the energy, participate in interactive features, and connect with the action - and the brand - beyond the screen. But here's the challenge: delays and a lack of engagement kill the excitement. Frustrated fans will seek out alternative platforms that deliver the immersive and rewarding experiences that they seek. One company helping brands deliver on these needs is LiveLike.

As a veteran of the sports media industry with 35 years of experience at Deltatre, Carlo De Marchis recently delivered a thought-provoking keynote at our Fan Engagement Summit exploring the current state of fan engagement, the challenges faced by organizations, and the potential scenarios for the future of realtime fan engagement in sports and media. In the following video and post, Carlo shares what he presented at the Ably Summit with a re-recorded version of his presentation, and summary of key points.

Ably LiveSync is a product we launched last month to help developers deliver live updates in their applications by automatically keeping their database and frontend clients in sync. LiveSync is made of two components, the Models SDK that runs on the client, and the database connector that listens to changes in your database and syncs those changes to your clients.

In the ever-evolving world of sports and entertainment, fan engagement has emerged as a critical factor in driving retention and long-term success. At the Ably Realtime Fan Engagement Summit in New York City, industry experts shared valuable insights into the relationship between fan engagement and retention, emphasizing the importance of creating compelling digital experiences and fostering genuine connections.

Ably was proud to celebrate our 8th birthday this year, and we’ve enjoyed reflecting on some of our achievements since launching in 2016. When we launched, we believed that realtime interactions would underpin our everyday digital experiences, rather than just augment them. And so we set out on a mission to build the definitive realtime experience platform.

We’re excited to announce that Ably LiveSync is now in public alpha! LiveSync is a state synchronisation product that allows you to watch changes to your database and publish them reliably to millions of frontend clients, enabling those clients to stay up to date with the latest changes in realtime.

Ably’s LiveSync product is now available as a public alpha release. LiveSync allows you to automatically keep data in sync across servers and clients, in realtime. This is a hard distributed systems problem. In this post, we’re going to have a look at four existing solutions to realtime data synchronization, the different technical designs, and the tradeoffs they make.

The Ably service handles massive amounts of data throughput and concurrent connections for many customers while maintaining a highly reliable and available service, with a 5x9s uptime guarantee. Ably has no scale ceiling, and that’s challenging work (it’s one of the reasons I joined Ably). While the challenges we face in delivering our service are compelling, we sometimes face novel internet scale problems, such as breaching the limits of AWS services!

This is the last in a series of posts on adding an in-game chat room with React. In the first, we added a chat room to a game of tic-tac-toe. In the second, we used Presence to add a typing indicator. And in the third we used Presence to show whether or not an opponent has left the game. Now, let's look at how to add the last feature - reaction emojis on our opponent's messages.

This is the third in a series of posts on adding an in-game chat room with React. In the first post, we added a chat room to a game of tic-tac-toe. In the second, we used Presence to add typing indicators that show us when the other person in the chat is typing. With all of that in place, this post will build on our chat app even further.