Introduction
Rugby Ontario hosts the Canadian Rugby Championship, the national provincial competition for men’s and women’s fifteens. dnode produces it. Our crew, our cameras, our replay, our uplink from the field.
In 2026 the mandate widened. The championship also had to exist on demand and on the public record, under Rugby Ontario’s own brand, from a single source of truth. So we built the platform underneath our own broadcast.
One crew shoots the match and scores it, and that single action updates the on-air scorebug, the live stream, the public standings and the printable match report at the same moment. Twenty matches across two national championships ran on it.
You can watch the result at rugbyontario.tv and read the record at stats.dnode.app.
Year
2026 - Ongoing
Duration
Multi-year Partnership
Client
Rugby Ontario
Category
Software Development
Challenges
A provincial sport organization in Canada normally assembles a broadcast from four separate purchases: a freelance crew to shoot it, a streaming service to deliver it, a scoresheet platform for the statistics, and a graphics operator for the scorebug. Four suppliers, four contracts, and nobody answerable for whether the result holds together. The same score is entered three times, the three records disagree, and none of it belongs to the federation once the season closes.
Three demands shaped the brief.
The audience arrives all at once. A championship pulls its entire audience into a two-hour window. Whatever we built had to treat that as normal, not as a spike to survive.
The data outruns the picture. Live scoring reaches a web page in seconds. Live video takes considerably longer. Left alone, the scoreboard announces a try before anyone watching has seen it.
The record has to outlive the broadcast. Matches get deleted from source systems at the end of a season. Officials correct a card three days later. A player’s stats have to survive both.
Solutions
We produce the match ourselves. Our crew is at the venue: multi-camera, live replay, commentary and on-site direction, with the feed encoded and sent from the field over LTE or the venue’s own internet. Nobody hands us a picture. That matters more than it sounds, because the camera and the scoreboard start in the same crew.
One source of truth. Scoring happens once, on our own scoring tool at that same venue. Everything downstream derives from it: the graphics on air, the video at rugbyontario.tv, the statistics at stats.dnode.app, and a printable match report for unions and media. Nobody types a score twice, so no two surfaces can disagree.
Audience is not an infrastructure variable. The platform is built so that a hundred thousand viewers cost what a thousand do. On the busiest day of the championship it absorbed 1.07 million viewer requests without the audience ever becoming an operational question. That is a property of the design, not a capacity plan we execute on match day.
The page never spoils the broadcast. Because we run both the camera and the scoring, we could measure the gap between them on a live match. The score was reaching viewers roughly forty seconds before the try appeared on their screen. The platform closes that gap, and each organization sets it to match its own venue, while the statistics site stays instant for anyone who just wants the result.
Replays you can jump into. A viewer reading the play-by-play can jump straight to a try in the replay. A separate control skips the ten minutes of pre-match and starts at the kick-off. Both work on matches recorded before either feature existed.
A record that outlives its source. When a match finishes, the full play-by-play, rosters and statistics become the federation’s own permanent copy, independent of the systems that produced them. Corrections made afterwards reach the standings, the leaderboards and the player pages within seconds.
Impact
Rugby Ontario runs its national championship on infrastructure it controls, published under its own brand, at a cost that does not rise with the size of the audience.
3,518 unique viewers on the peak day, counted by device, not by page event
7,655 viewer-hours delivered across the championship, from 459,275 minutes of video
38.8% of all viewing happened after full time, on replays
20 matches across two national championships, on one platform
27× request absorption at the edge on the busiest day
The same platform now runs three provincial sport organizations across three sports, Rugby Ontario, the Ontario Hockey Federation and Ontario Soccer, from a single codebase, each under its own brand.
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