Fastly has revealed details of its expanded collaboration with ITVX during this year’s summer of sport.
The partnership builds on foundations laid during the 2022 World Cup, when Fastly was implemented as one of ITV’s CDN providers. Following its successful provision of additional network bandwidth which enabled ITVX to quickly scale up operations in response to what was then record-breaking viewership, the company was again engaged for this summer’s Euro 2024 competition.
Fastly’s Media Shield was implemented behind ITV’s multi-CDN deployment, meaning quality and resilience of live streams were boosted, said the company. ITV mean for 503 errors through Fastly were <0.01 per cent across the tournament. Media Shield’s request collapsing facility allowed requests to be reliably processed during high demand periods, with origin traffic reduced and unnecessary egress fees prevented, said the company.
During the weeks of competition, traffic totalling 124.26 petabytes passed through Media Shield, supporting both the network’s Euro 2024 coverage and Love Island streams. Achieving the highest livestream audience for a single broadcaster, the platform handled 16.8 million viewers for the semi-final match between England and the Netherlands.
ITV’s director of engineering, Mark Ison, said, “Streaming during these moments where the whole nation is locked in is all or nothing. We need to deliver during every second of play, and after the last World Cup we knew that Fastly was the right partner to further boost our streaming infrastructure in time for the first kick off. Media Shield was powerful enough to process the most demand we’ve ever dealt with, but also incredibly easy for us to plug in and use. Our strong viewing share was testament to the quality of stream our vendors helped us to provide.”
