SBS uses New Relic to handle World Cup streaming surge

SBS used New Relic's infrastructure monitoring tools during the broadcaster's FIFA World Cup coverage. The tournament reached 18 million people in Australia across broadcast and digital platforms.

The broadcaster reported no major technical issues during what it described as its biggest digital World Cup operation to date.

SBS delivered 146 million broadcast streams during the tournament, up 155% from the 2022 event. Concurrent streaming peaked at 1.5 million viewers during the final. The broadcaster also carried 104 live matches, 40 more than in 2022.

Monitoring demand

The scale of the tournament put sustained pressure on SBS's digital systems, particularly because live sport can trigger sharp spikes in viewing in the minutes before kick-off. Its delivery chain combined in-house systems with third-party services, making end-to-end visibility increasingly important as traffic rose.

Before the tournament, SBS's engineering team created a unified dashboard in New Relic to monitor system health across matches. The setup gave the team visibility across 15 service components and more than 90 metrics, replacing what SBS described as a more fragmented view of critical services.

Rob Hussey, SBS Technical and Strategic Operations Manager, said the event represented the broadcaster's toughest digital infrastructure test.

"The World Cup is the single biggest test of our digital infrastructure every four years, and this tournament was our most demanding yet - more matches, more streams and more concurrent viewers than we'd ever handled," Hussey said.

SBS used audience forecasting to identify matches likely to create the highest demand, then adjusted infrastructure levels to leave enough headroom for traffic surges. It also ran load tests at projected volumes and used the monitoring system to track throughput and latency across the technology stack.

This allowed engineers to identify constraints at the component level rather than investigate the entire pipeline when issues emerged. SBS said the approach also helped it manage infrastructure changes between tournaments instead of relying on configurations used for previous events.

Real-time visibility

Hussey said the operational view across systems gave engineers real-time information during the competition.

"Having a single, unified view across 15 service components and more than 90 metrics using New Relic meant our engineering team could see exactly how every part of the pipeline was performing in real time, rather than piecing together signals from different systems," he said.

"This visibility contributed to SBS delivering the tournament with zero major technical issues," added Hussey.

The performance comes as SBS extends its relationship with football's world governing body after securing exclusive Australian broadcast, video and radio rights for the 2030 FIFA World Cup. The broadcaster said its partnership with FIFA began in 1986.

Future coverage

For New Relic, the SBS project offers a reference point in media streaming as broadcasters face larger online audiences during major live events. Monitoring and testing have become more important for media groups trying to avoid service failures during mass-viewing moments, especially where internal platforms depend on outside vendors and cloud-based services.

Rob Newell, New Relic Senior Vice President and General Manager for APJ, said SBS had treated observability as a central operational issue during the tournament.

"SBS set out to deliver its FIFA World Cup coverage at significant scale, and doing that meant treating observability as core infrastructure," Newell said.

"We're proud to have supported SBS's engineering team with the visibility they needed to plan for peak demand and help resolve the few issues that arose before audiences ever noticed," added Newell.