Digital Plumbing: The Infrastructure Behind Streaming Sports

Major sporting events bring people together across borders and cultures, and the FIFA World Cup is perhaps the biggest of all such events. During the 2022 tournament, about 1.5 billion viewers from across the globe tuned into the final match, and that was just one match out of many. FIFA estimates that about 5 billion people engaged with content from the 2022 World Cup across all platforms and devices.[1]

This year’s World Cup promises to be even bigger. It will be the first edition of the tournament to feature teams from 48 nations instead of 32. This means more matches across more venues, with more fans taking a direct interest in the action. This raises some difficult questions:

• What does it take to bring all the matches to so many viewers, with a consistent experience across all time zones?
• How will broadcasters scale up to ingest, edit and distribute content from 104 different matches played in cities all across North America?
• How will they do that in a cost-effective way, without building permanent infrastructure that they’ll no longer need once the six-week event is over?

The answer to all of these questions? Data centers and network infrastructure.

Just like with every other aspect of our day-to-day digital lives, data centers form the unseen foundation that makes streaming sports possible. When you gather with friends and family to watch a match and feel that moment of transcendent joy when the ball hits the back of the net, data centers helped make that happen.

Our Digital Plumbing series of blog posts is all about making the unseen seen. Let’s take a closer look at how digital infrastructure and ecosystem partners come together to enable an exceptional experience for sports viewers around the world.

Inside the content life cycle for streaming sports

Of course, the first step in the streaming sports life cycle is to capture footage from the various matches.

These live feeds will take advantage of high-resolution formats such as 8K to give viewers at home the same clarity as if they were watching the match in person. This is great for viewers, but it’s a challenge for broadcasters because the feeds are so large. They’ll need scalable network infrastructure in order to move this footage without delay.

Broadcasters will use a combination of public internet connectivity and ethernet services to move the footage from the stadium to the content production facility as quickly as possible. They’ll work with an ecosystem of different ISPs and NSPs to get the connectivity needed.

Inside the content production facility, broadcasters will:

• Store the content. This ensures it will be readily available for all subsequent production steps.
• Digitize and transcode the content. This includes creating the specific digital formats required for editing and production workflows.
• Edit the content. This includes compiling different chunks of raw content into a cohesive viewing experience. It could also include adding advertisements and titles to the raw content.
• Prepare the content for distribution. This involves uploading the edited footage into content management systems.
• Transmit the content to the content provider. This process is known as “content playout.”
• Distribute the content to viewers. Providers will cache the content on a series of content delivery networks (CDNs) to ensure proximity to end users and cover the “last mile” quickly. This content distribution must be synchronized to ensure that all fans throughout the world experience key events at the same time.

The reason that major sporting events like the World Cup or the Olympics feel like such a communal global experience is because we all get to watch them happen in near-real time. Compare this with other digital experiences like streaming a hot new album. The moment the album drops will create a massive spike in traffic, but fans will continue to stream the album as time goes on. With sports, experiencing the event live, at the same time that everyone in your social media feed is posting about it, is the entire point.

Streaming live sports is only possible because broadcasters have figured out how to minimize latency across every step of the content life cycle, from acquisition to management to delivery. And the only reason they’re able to achieve that is because they choose the right infrastructure strategy and the right ecosystem partners.

Choosing the right digital infrastructure for sports streaming

When it comes to their content management infrastructure, broadcasters have options. They can either deploy inside a private cage in a colocation data center or in a cloud environment. Both options provide the flexibility needed to scale up resources in a cost-effective manner before a big event like the World Cup and then scale back down after the event.

In the content and digital media industry, the question is not “colocation or cloud?” Most broadcasters are using a hybrid infrastructure model to get the best of both worlds. For instance:

• Broadcasters can leave their high-quality video assets in a colocation storage environment that they maintain complete control over.
• They can use cloud storage for low-res proxy versions, which are much smaller and quicker to move for agile post-production workloads.
• After they process content in the cloud, they can send lightweight JSON instruction files back to the private infrastructure environment. Then, they can apply the same changes made in the cloud to the original high-quality video assets.
• Since the larger video files don’t have to move from colocation to cloud and back, broadcasters can maintain control over those files locally and keep data egress costs low.

Who makes up the digital media ecosystem?

To handle an event the size of the World Cup, broadcasters can’t do it alone. They need help from a wide array of ecosystem partners:

• Network service providers (NSPs) and internet service providers (ISPs) help provide low-latency connectivity to quickly move raw footage from event venues to the content management site, and quickly move edited footage from the content management site to distribution.
• Cloud providers offer flexible, scalable infrastructure wherever broadcasters need it to enable agile editing and production capabilities.
• Content providers cover the final leg of the distribution process. These could include streaming services owned by traditional broadcast networks, but also social networks. For instance, FIFA has announced streaming partnerships with both TikTok and YouTube for the 2026 World Cup.[2]
• These providers use both content delivery networks (CDNs) and internet peering to get streaming content to viewers quickly and ensure an excellent user experience.
• Broadcast security providers help protect content throughout its life cycle. This includes providing anti-piracy capabilities that help protect the broadcasters’ investment in the event.

Since broadcasters need to work with so many different partners, it’s important for them to deploy in the locations where those ecosystem partners are already gathering. Equinix colocation data centers are already home to thousands of partners, including content and digital media providers, clouds, NSPs, ISPs and more. Customers can create direct, private connections to those partners quickly using Equinix Fabric®, our virtual interconnection solution.

How does data sovereignty impact sports streaming?

The World Cup is a truly global event, which will draw viewers from every corner of the world. Also, this year’s World Cup will be the first hosted across three different countries. With matches taking place across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and those same matches being watched in essentially every country on the planet, it adds up to a lot of digital traffic crossing international borders.

This makes the World Cup challenging from a data sovereignty perspective: Broadcasters need to figure out how to distribute their traffic to viewers across the world, without running afoul of local requirements in any specific jurisdiction.

Data sovereignty is simply a matter of control. Broadcasters need control over where their data is archived and processed. Private infrastructure offers full control over physical hardware and placement. In contrast, public cloud abstracts the underlying physical infrastructure, thus offering less control over data processing and location.

Broadcasters also need control over where their data moves, which can be more challenging. It requires intelligent networking solutions to ensure that data traffic doesn’t just follow the quickest, most direct route from point to point. It needs to follow the best route, accounting for both performance and compliance requirements.

Equinix Fabric Geo Zones is the new sovereignty enforcement layer of Equinix Fabric. Customers can design connections that respect boundaries and comply with digital sovereignty requirements in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. A new EU zone is coming soon.

The digital media ecosystem comes together at Equinix

Equinix data centers make ideal interconnection hubs; no matter who broadcasters need to connect with, there’s a good chance they’ll find them already at Equinix. This is why we recently surpassed half a million interconnections at Equinix. Each one of these represents an opportunity for partners to create business value, accelerate innovation and improve the user experience.

And since Equinix interconnection hubs are found in many different strategic metros throughout the world, we offer the reach needed to support a global streaming event like the World Cup.

Equinix is the place where the content and digital media ecosystem comes together. But this is just one sector where we’re enabling exceptional digital experiences by helping customers access the right infrastructure and partners in the right locations. For more examples, read the e-book: How Equinix customers turn data into value.

[1] FIFA, One Month On: 5 billion engaged with the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™, January 18, 2023.

[2] Engadget, YouTube and FIFA partner up for the 2026 World Cup, March 17, 2026.