Major Streaming Events Don’t Have to Break the Internet—and Here’s Why

The Olympic Games are a celebration of greatness in sports. Athletes participating in this year’s Games have worked for years to fine-tune their abilities, and now it all comes down to performing at their best over the next several weeks. Outside the Games themselves, there’s a similar story happening with broadcasters entrusted to deliver the action to millions of fans around the world.

As a streaming event, the Olympics Games are unique. Everything about them is big, from the amount of content to the size of the global audience:

• The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will feature 329 medal events across 32 sports, and streaming platforms will make all of them available to viewers around the world. This represents an estimated 3,800 hours of live content.[1]
• More than 3 billion people worldwide watched the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and this year’s event is expected to match or surpass that number.[2]

More than 30 media rights-holders will distribute the Olympics around the world.[3] These companies know that their viewers will demand an exceptional user experience: access to the content they want, wherever they want it, without delay or interruption.

Exceptional service cannot be ensured without scalable digital infrastructure in all the right places. The infrastructure solutions deployed at this year’s Olympics can provide inspiration for any future event with massive—but temporary—capacity requirements.

Infrastructure on demand enables event-driven streaming solutions

Streamers at this year’s Olympics will manage a series of workflows and processes across the content lifecycle. To start with, they’ll capture content from the various venues. This alone will be an impressive feat of infrastructure and logistics: The venues are spread not just across Paris, but all of France. This even includes Tahiti—a French overseas territory located thousands of kilometers away from Paris—which will host the surfing events.[4]

Once they’ve captured the content, they’ll need to transfer it to a processing facility. After editing—including adding titles and advertisements to the raw content—the content has to be distributed to every corner of the globe. To make viewers feel they’re experiencing the action similar to fans at the venue, each step of the content lifecycle has to happen as quickly as possible.

The Content and Digital Media Lifecycle

This means that streamers need a multifaceted infrastructure solution, including scalable networking, compute and storage capacity. They also need to access that capacity on a temporary basis—that is, they need to avoid massively overpaying for physical infrastructure they may no longer need after the Games. That’s why working with a partner that offers on-demand virtual infrastructure services can be so helpful.

A typical solution would be to scale a colocation presence in several core metros close to the content source. Due to the global footprint of Equinix IBX® data centers, customers can achieve this quickly in their choice of network-dense locations. Utilizing Equinix interconnection services such as Equinix Fabric®, customers can set up a private network between the chosen sites. This ensures rapid failover to the secondary site when needed, to avoid any impact to the streaming experience.

Customers can increase connectivity to the cloud directly from these locations to enable further infrastructure scalability. Using low-latency cloud on-ramps at Equinix, they can access cloud services on demand, which can support cost management.

Working with Equinix provides the flexibility to do all these things for the duration of any event, and then easily scale down to business as usual in the aftermath.

For streamers, digital infrastructure is more than just events

The value Platform Equinix® can offer to our content and digital media (CDM) customers stretches far beyond any single event, no matter how big that event might be.

In addition to event-driven solutions, we’ve also helped customers in the CDM vertical with more long-term digital infrastructure projects, including data center consolidation and network optimization. Many of them have adopted Equinix Fabric for virtual interconnection, enabling multicloud networking and enhanced connectivity between their own infrastructure in different metros.

Our customers can also benefit from easy access to our ecosystem of thousands of partners and service providers. Crucially for streamers, this dense global ecosystem includes thousands of network service providers (NSPs) from around the world.

Equinix Precision Time®, our Time as a Service solution, could also be particularly valuable to our CDM customers. It gives them access to precise timing that’s resistant to jamming and spoofing attacks. This allows streamers to synchronize the delivery of their audio and video feeds, an essential aspect of ensuring an excellent viewer experience.

Using either colocation services or Equinix Metal®, our dedicated bare metal solution, CDM companies can take advantage of cloud adjacent storage. This means that they can cache content on a storage environment that they control, and then move that data into multiple clouds as needed. This helps them access cloud services on demand, thus ensuring the infrastructure flexibility they need to scale up capacity for any major event.

Since they maintain copies of their data in a storage environment that they own and control, there’s no risk of high data egress fees or getting locked into a particular cloud provider. Also, the flow of data back and forth to the cloud is supported by Equinix Fabric, thus enabling low latency.

The diagram below shows how Platform Equinix helps connect streamers to the resources they need to support the entire content lifecycle. Specifically, when they need to perform content management processes like transcoding, editing and production, streamers can remotely access Equinix resources from their own post-production facilities. They have the flexibility to start small with a private cage and then scale up quickly by adding Equinix Metal servers and/or public cloud services.

Content acquisition, management and distribution on Platform Equinix

Helping companies prepare for the unexpected

Of course, streamers have several years to plan an optimized experience before each Olympics, but there are other events that don’t offer the same level of advanced notice. Think of unplanned, one-off events that result in massive spikes in activity, like surprise album drops or major breaking news stories. The fact that these events could happen at any time means that companies need to be ready to scale their infrastructure to suit.

With its global colocation footprint and robust portfolio of digital infrastructure services, Platform Equinix can help our customers unlock the on-demand solutions they need to be ready for anything. In fact, the same design principles that help CDM companies thrive—distributed, interconnected infrastructure at the digital edge—can be applied to any customer experience use case that requires low-latency connectivity to end users in many locations. Consider things like personalized offers for retail customers, better patient engagement in healthcare, and digital banking services optimized for specific users.

Optimizing for the future of content delivery

Many content and digital media companies are also starting to recognize the value of a private content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a network of distributed servers that cache frequently accessed content in proximity to viewers. When viewers stream content, they are automatically connected to the nearest content server, thus decreasing latency, and ensuring a better, more consistent streaming experience.

CDNs offer scalability in various locations, thus helping streamers meet increased demand without the risk of performance degradation. They’re also reliable, thanks to redundant servers and automatic failover capabilities, and secure, thanks to encryption and DDoS mitigation capabilities.

To help ensure that any one server does not end up overwhelmed in a high-demand streaming scenario, CDNs also offer load-balancing services to spread traffic across available servers. And with content compression and optimization capabilities, CDNs can help streamers reduce the total volume of data they need to move and store.

What are the benefits of a private content delivery network?

Private CDNs are particularly well suited for streaming major events. In addition to the benefits named above, they are single-tenant and customizable, available as a Service, and not subject to the risk of vendor lock-in.

With private CDNs, you can achieve the following benefits:

• Control and security: You get the flexibility to design and build the CDN that meets your exact needs. For example, you’re able to control where your cache nodes are located, how many cache nodes there are, and how the different cache nodes are connected to one another. You’re also free to apply the security capabilities you need to protect your content throughout every stage of its lifecycle—a must for any company handling a high-profile event like the Olympics.
• Optimized performance: Placing the right servers in the right locations is essential to keeping latency low and ensuring fewer network hops when distributing content. In addition, a private network removes performance bottlenecks. Your traffic always follows the most direct route possible, instead of competing with other traffic for bandwidth, as it would in a multitenant networking scenario.
• Scalability that works for you: There’s no limit to the size of a private CDN. It could range from a single pair of interconnected cache nodes in one region all the way up to a global platform that handles terabytes of content daily.
• Cost efficiency: Deploy the infrastructure you need on demand, without high CAPEX spend. Utilize cloud adjacent storage to incorporate multicloud services into your CDN without falling victim to exorbitant data egress fees.

Private CDN development on Platform Equinix

In partnership with Varnish Software, Equinix is developing private CDNs as a customer-operated solution built on Equinix Metal and backed by Equinix Fabric interconnection capabilities. Pairing Varnish software with Equinix digital infrastructure services can give you the flexibility to build the architecture you want and host your content cache nodes where you want. As a result, you’ll be able to target particular user groups in specific locations. Watch the video below to learn more about using Varnish Software to build private CDNs on Equinix infrastructure.

In addition to supporting high-performance content delivery across your private CDN, Equinix Fabric can lower your network bandwidth and data egress costs by at least 40% when used as part of a cloud adjacent data architecture.

Finally, Equinix Network Edge offers a variety of virtual network functions, including routers, firewalls, SD-WAN devices and load balancers, from top vendors like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet. Deploying these devices on demand can help ensure the performance, reliability and security that your private CDN demands.

To learn more about how all businesses are using distributed digital infrastructure at the edge to deliver the experience their users expect, read the IDC report Create Exceptional Customer Experiences with Data, AI, and Edge.

[1] Warner Bros. Discovery marks key milestone by offering first look at its Paris 2024 production plan, Eurosport, April 17, 2024.

[2] Advertising Around the 2024 Paris Olympics: Who Will Be Watching, and Why?, Cox Media, October 12, 2023.

[3] IOC Marketing Media Guide: Paris 2024, International Olympic Committee, June 18, 2024.

[4] Teahupo’o, Tahiti, Paris 2024

[5] Less, better and for longer: Five ways Paris 2024 is delivering more sustainable Games, International Olympic Committee, April 22, 2024.

[6] Paris 2024 Olympic Aquatics Centre – for the neighbourhood, for the long term, International Olympic Committee, April 5, 2024.