Cool Schools – School Sport Streaming

The Brief

Cool Schools set out to give school sport the broadcast treatment: live-streamed matches parents can watch from anywhere, with real scores, real fixtures and real teams — not a shaky phone video on a group chat. They needed a platform that could manage the full sporting life of a school (teams, athletes, fixtures, results) and put a live-production-quality stream on top of it, priced for schools rather than broadcasters.

What we built

DankoSpark built the Cool Schools platform end to end. At its core is a sports management system covering schools, teams, athletes, matches and scoring, with role-based administration. Around it, the features that make it feel alive: real-time score updates pushed to every viewer the moment they happen, live messaging, favourites, and scheduled match reminders.

The centrepiece is the streaming pipeline. On the ground, a dedicated CoolSchools Streamer iOS app turns an iPhone into the broadcast unit: it captures camera and audio, streams live, and renders live score overlays on the video in real time — fed straight from the match data in the platform, so the score on screen updates the moment the scorer records it. Behind it, a media streaming service built on FFmpeg handles the server-side pipeline and match-information overlays. The result: a school rugby match streamed from a phone with the polish of a televised fixture. Streams, results and team pages are managed from the same platform the school already uses for its sport admin, and the system carries advertising placements so schools and the platform can monetise coverage.

The stack is enterprise-grade: a .NET clean architecture backend, Angular front end, a native iOS streaming app, SignalR pushing live data to viewers and to the broadcast overlays, background job scheduling for reminders and processing, and Azure cloud hosting with blob storage for media and key-vault-managed secrets.

Outcome

Cool Schools runs school sport coverage that used to require an outside broadcast unit — from fixture to final whistle on one platform. In the words of co-founder Hamilton Wessels: “DankoSpark se diens en professionaliteit is ongelooflik. Geen werk of idee is te groot of te veel vir hulle nie! Nie net is kwaliteit prioriteit nie, maar ook lekker manne om saam mee te werk!!”