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Work / case study

DogSport USA

An online community, breed registry and live-events platform for dog sport enthusiasts. Pedigree registry, sport clubs, live event broadcasts, and a handler and breeder network, on the web and in its own iOS and Android apps, serving the US, Canada and Europe. Built, hosted and operated end to end.

Visit dogsport-usa.com
DogSport USA homepage: a handler heeling a German Shepherd at a trial, under the headline Tracking. Obedience. Protection.
The DogSport USA home page.

The platform in numbers

Dogs in the registry
276,000+across 13 breeds
Competition titles
103,000+recorded
Health records
78,000+on file
Event results
46,000+catalogued
Handler profiles
9,900+
Sport clubs
223
Live broadcasts
22aired
Broadcast viewers
900+members who have watched one

Counted from the platform database on October 1, 2026. The registry covers Doberman Pinschers, Cane Corsos, German Shepherds, American Bulldogs and Giant Schnauzers in depth, plus 3,000+ events, 10,400+ community posts and 1,100+ members.

The brief

Dog sports are a devoted but niche world, scattered across generic forums, social media groups and spreadsheets. DogSport USA set out to give the community a real home: a searchable breed registry with pedigrees, sport clubs to organize around, live broadcasts of events, and a way for handlers and breeders to find each other. All in one platform, owned outright rather than rented.

What was built

  • Registry

    Multi-breed pedigree registry with titles, results, standings and bloodline analysis, fed by nightly and weekly imports

  • Live events

    Multi-day broadcasts with on-screen lower thirds, live chat, the running order, and replays

  • Per-dog clips

    Each dog's run is cut from the live stream and ready to watch while the event is still on air

  • Broadcaster app

    Event crews run the show from a phone: go live, mark each dog, hand off to helpers

  • Ask Max

    A built-in assistant that answers from a curated knowledge base and the registry itself, and only calls an AI model when it has to

  • Mobile apps

    Native iOS and Android apps with push notifications, plus the installable web app

  • Clubs

    Sport clubs and chapters for members to join, follow and get notified about

  • Community

    One merged feed, handler and breeder profiles, and networking

  • Sponsors

    Sponsor placements with impression and click reporting

  • Payments

    Square checkout, validated for cross-border buyers

  • Three regions

    Front doors for the US, Canada and Europe

  • Operations

    Built and run in-house: app, streaming, hosting and network

Under the hood

DogSport USA runs its own live-video pipeline on AWS Elemental. Each event gets a MediaLive channel built for it on demand and torn down afterward, so nothing bills between events. MediaLive feeds a standing pool of MediaPackage channels. That pool lives in two regions: Virginia for North America and Frankfurt for European clubs, so a European broadcast never has to cross the Atlantic before it reaches viewers. Crews send video over encrypted SRT, RTMP or YouTube. If the camera signal drops, the stream switches itself to a sponsor loop and comes back when the signal returns.

Replays and per-dog clips are cut from the live archive in S3 within about half a minute of each run. A 32-core render server burns in the overlays. That server starts itself when work arrives and shuts down after twenty idle minutes, so heavy video work costs almost nothing between events. Everything is delivered through CloudFront with signed URLs, so paid content stays paid. Building the website is the easy part. Building the streaming stack behind it is the hard part.

What it runs on

  • Backend

    Node.js / Express API on PostgreSQL and Redis

  • Realtime

    WebSockets for live updates during events

  • Streaming

    AWS MediaLive (per-event channels) and MediaPackage, in us-east-1 and eu-central-1

  • Ingest

    SRT listener with keys held in AWS Secrets Manager; RTMP and YouTube sources

  • Video jobs

    On-demand EC2 render server (32 vCPU) with FFmpeg, started and stopped by the job queue

  • Delivery

    CloudFront with signed URLs; S3 for media, live archive and replays

  • Edge

    One CloudFront front door for the US, Canada and Europe domains, behind AWS WAF

  • Email

    Amazon SES with delivery, bounce and complaint events over signed SNS notifications

  • Mobile

    Capacitor iOS and Android apps around the same React build, with push notifications

  • AI

    Claude for Ask Max and for back-office agents that check registry data and watch live streams, each with a daily spending cap and a human approving what they suggest

  • Payments

    Square

  • Security

    JWT auth, bcrypt, rate limiting, crawler defense, hardened headers

Why it matters

The web platform, the servers behind it, the network they live on, and the payment and email systems around them all came from the same person. When something needs changing, there is no vendor finger-pointing and no waiting on a support queue. You talk to the engineer who built it.

DogSport USA is an independent venture of RedCyfer's owner. It is also the platform behind RedCyfer's streaming and media service.

Need a platform like this?

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