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

Editor’s Note: This blog was originally published in July 2024. It was updated in February 2026 to include the latest information.

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 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy will feature 116 medal events across 16 disciplines, and streaming platforms will make all of them available to viewers around the world. This represents more than 6,500 hours of total coverage.[1]
• More than 2 billion people worldwide watched the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, and this year’s event is expected to match or surpass that number.[2]

Fourteen media rights-holders representing more than 80 broadcast sublicensees 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 life cycle.

To start with, they’ll capture content from the various venues. This alone will be an impressive feat of infrastructure and logistics: The 2026 Winter Olympics will be the first Olympic Games ever to be officially co-hosted by two different cities, with event venues spread across northern Italy. Because Milan and Cortina are located about 250 miles apart, it wouldn’t be practical for athletes to travel between the two hubs. That’s why organizers plan to stage two simultaneous cauldron lightings and athlete parades for the opening ceremonies, allowing athletes based in both locations to take part. Broadcasters will be tasked with turning the two separate events into one coherent experience for viewers at home.[4]

Once they’ve captured the content from the various venues, 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 venues, each step of the content life cycle has to happen as quickly as possible.

The Content and Digital Media Life Cycle

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’ll 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 the Equinix Fabric® interconnection service, 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 also increase connectivity to the cloud directly from these locations to enable further infrastructure scalability, using the native low-latency cloud on-ramps found in Equinix data centers.

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 Equinix offers 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. This solution allows streamers to synchronize the delivery of their audio and video feeds, an essential aspect of an excellent viewer experience. It also provides a layer of security with access to precise timing that’s resistant to jamming and spoofing attacks.

Using our colocation services, CDM companies can deploy in proximity to the clouds of their choice and then tap into our industry-leading portfolio of cloud on-ramps. 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 privacy and low latency.

The diagram below shows how Equinix helps connect streamers to the resources they need to support the entire content life cycle. 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 public cloud services.

Content acquisition, management and distribution at Equinix

Streaming in a hybrid cloud architecture

In a hybrid cloud streaming workflow, large-scale, high-quality video assets can remain inside a private storage environment at an Equinix IBX data center, called an authoritative data core. Meanwhile, low-resolution proxy versions, which are a fraction of the size of the original high-quality assets, can be hosted in the cloud to enable agile post-production. Streamers can use the Amazon S3 protocol for object storage to ensure compatibility and efficient data exchange between environments.

Equinix Fabric virtual interconnection services enable hybrid multicloud networking and enhanced connectivity between the high-quality video storage and the proxy versions in the cloud.

Post-production teams can leverage cloud services to process video chunks, insert advertisements, apply AI enhancements and augment metadata without moving the full-resolution files. This approach minimizes egress costs because only lightweight JSON instruction files are returned to the on-premises system, where changes are applied to the original high-quality content. By adopting a cloud-adjacent infrastructure strategy, streamers can combine the cost-efficiency of storing data locally with scalability and advanced cloud capabilities. This helps enable seamless collaboration while preserving authoritative data integrity.

Helping streamers prepare for the unexpected

Streamers have years to plan an optimized experience before each Olympic Games, but there are other events that don’t offer the same level of advanced notice. Think of one-off events that result in massive spikes in activity, like a major album drop or a breaking news story. The fact that these events could happen at any time means that companies need to be ready to scale their infrastructure to suit.

With our global colocation footprint and robust portfolio of digital infrastructure services, Equinix can help 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.

To learn more about how businesses are using distributed digital infrastructure at the edge to ensure low latency and connect with the right partners in the right places, read our real-world customer stories.

[1] IOC Marketing Media Guide: Milano Cortina 2026, International Olympic Committee, January 7, 2026.

[2] Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 watched by more than 2 billion people, International Olympic Committee, October 20, 2022.

[3] IOC Marketing Media Guide: Milano Cortina 2026, International Olympic Committee, January 7, 2026.

[4] Molly Hunter, Laura Saravia and Rohan Nadkarni, How Italy will pull off the Olympics in two cities more than 250 miles apart, NBC News, October 29, 2025.