Winning at Scale: How Foxtel Delivers Flawless 4K Sports To 1M+ Concurrent Fans With Fastly’s Developer-Friendly CDN
COMPANY NEWS: Foxtel Group is Australia’s leading subscription television and streaming company. Through its flagship consumer brands – Foxtel, Kayo Sports and BINGE, Foxtel Group connects millions to the sport and entertainment experiences they love.Foxtel Group’s portfolio also includes Fox Sports Australia, the nation’s leading sports production company, and Foxtel Media, its innovative advertising sales business.
Foxtel operates at a massive scale across its suite of platforms, streaming between 200-400 live events each week to a passionate Australian sports audience. When the company decided to launch a 4K Ultra HD product for its Kayo Sports and Foxtel subscribers, it created an enormous technical challenge. “We were a bit worried about how much capacity we were going to have in country,” said Stephen Huffadine, head of OTT delivery at Foxtel Group, especially during peak events that can attract more than a million concurrent subscribers.
The stakes were incredibly high. For a premium streaming service, quality isn’t a vague goal; it’s a set of critical, measurable KPIs. “We monitor join time, which is obviously essential, and then buffer ratio and rebuffering ratio,” said Niklas Hammarstrom, director of streaming and advertising technology at Foxtel Group.
Failure to maintain these metrics would have immediate business consequences. Huffadine added, “It’s really important for us to maintain that quality. Otherwise, consumers are going to just start walking.”
Solution
To handle the 4K launch and ensure stability, Foxtel added Fastly to its multi-CDN strategy. The team needed more than just raw bandwidth; they needed a partner that could provide rapid, on-demand scale and a toolset that empowered their developers.
The partnership quickly proved successful, ultimately shifting Foxtel and Kayo Sports’ traffic distribution. “Today, the majority of our traffic is going over Fastly in Australia,” Hammarstrom noted.
Rapid, on-demand capacity for 1M+ concurrent viewers
For live events hitting more than a million concurrent viewers, a multi-CDN strategy is essential for failovers. However, this presents a unique challenge, as CDNs are often hesitant to maintain excessive, unused headroom. Foxtel found a key differentiator in Fastly’s agile approach to infrastructure. “The partnership with Fastly has shown that they can very quickly build out capacity when we require more capacity,” said Hammarstrom. This ability to instantly augment capacity gives Foxtel the confidence to handle record-breaking traffic spikes on its platforms without compromising performance.
Automation that eliminates errors and empowers developers
With a complex, large-scale operation, ease-of-use and automation are critical for reliability. The Foxtel team manages more than 60 unique video configurations in production. Making changes manually across all of them was not a viable option. “If you can’t automate it, there’s good chance you’re going to make a mistake on one of those,” Huffadine explained.
Fastly’s API-first design was a perfect fit. “We have been able to automate the majority of all of our CDN configurations,” said Hammarstrom. This automation saves time, prevents costly errors, and empowers the engineering team. “Fastly has been very developer friendly,” Hammarstrom added. “Our engineering team likes that Fastly offers a very simplistic approach.”
Real-time visibility to instantly solve playback issues
To monitor critical KPIs such as rebuffering and rendition switching, the Foxtel team relies on Fastly’s Real-Time Log Streaming and its native integration with their logging provider, Hydrolix. This gives them an immediate, clear view of platform health. “By having access to those logs, we can quickly identify playback problems, which gives us a very quick and clear understanding,” said Hammarstrom. This visibility not only helps Foxtel solve issues instantly but also facilitates deeper collaboration, as the data “helps us when we go and talk to our video player developers.”
“We started looking a lot at rendition switching as well,” he added. “That proves how stable the network is. If you’re streaming and you have a very volatile connection, the rendition switching would go up and down a lot due to the ABR [adaptive bit rate] capabilities in the players. And obviously a good CDN keeps the rendition switching low.”
Adding Fastly to its multi-CDN strategy gave Foxtel the two things it needed most: the confidence to scale for its highest-demand 4K events on Kayo Sports and Foxtel and a developer-friendly platform that simplified operations. Fastly provided the on-demand capacity, powerful automation for 60+ configurations, and the real-time visibility that Foxtel required to deliver a flawless experience to more than a million concurrent sports fans. As Hammarstrom said, “We had a problem to solve, and Fastly helped us solve it. They’ve proven over and over again that it is a good partnership for us.”
