Has Resilience Replaced Scale as Live Sports Streaming’s Chief Concern?
When it comes to withstanding traffic spikes and other factors that stress-test live streams, “your infrastructure is only as strong as the weakest part of the chain,” notes DAZN EVP James Pearce in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2026. So has the resiliency of streaming architecture become a greater factor in livestream success than insufficient scalability or CDN capacity? MTech Sport’s Matt Stagg, TATA Communications’ Corey Smith, and BT Group’s Ian Parr join the debate over where streams are most likely to break down today and whether CDN capacity problems have indeed been solved.
CDN Capacity, Then and Now
Stagg kicks off the discussion by raising the issue of whether traffic spikes are the challenges most likely to break live sports streams in 2026, or whether problems rooted in streaming infrastructure are more to blame. Turning to Pearce, he asks, “Are we moving from a scaling problem to a resilience problem?”
"Certainly, in DAZN's early days, Italy in particular was an area where we had some challenges where I think the internet just struggled a bit. And back then, CDNs and ISP capacity was a challenge."
Reflecting more on the current era, he continues, "It just seems that there's capacity and tooling and techniques out there that mean CDNs are better managed. But I think there are components that sit across the entire workflow that you need to consider, and you're only good as your weakest part of the chain. Historically, we've seen problems with DRM, and we've had challenges with long-running events and headend performance."
He goes on to note that every difficult stream is a learning experience, and one that spurs you to "plan better and test better. Several years ago CDNs were the worry, but less so now."
Codec Efficiency and Pushing Fewer Bits
Regarding CDNs, TATA’s Smith chimes in, "There are certainly less of them to work with these days than there were in the past. Good or bad or indifferent, the industry has shifted and obviously we're seeing the aftermath of some of that. But I think that codecs and video streaming itself have become more efficient in some ways where we're getting actually higher quality for lower bit rates. Ten, 15 years ago, trying to do 4K when I was at Xbox, we were testing 20- and 30-megabit streams. Even the largest CDNs on the planet would fail under some level of load geographically across their network, trying to add a million, two million, three million people to a 30-megabit stream. It'd be crazy town, right?"
By contrast, in today's streaming ecosystem with more efficient codecs, he says, "we don't have to stream that high. The efficiency of the way that the Elementals of the world and the Haivision encoders and the Atemes, all of those folks have worked really hard to provide efficiency in what it is that we're trying to do for live events."
As a result, he concludes, "We don't have to consume as much bandwidth on the wires we did before. Certainly, there are POPs and distribution points where, if we're getting client telemetry, we can figure out where those hotspots are and maybe do a little load shifting and shaping and those kinds of things. But I think it's less about the CDN capacity these days and more about the efficiency of how the internet routes."
Network Evolution and the Application Stack
BT Group’s Parr offers a somewhat different take on the same question, pointing to the “evolution and rollout of fiber to the premise and 5G networks and the improving quality and increased bandwidth that consumers can get have helped support this evolution or revolution--depending on which way you want to look at it--in online content delivery and premium live sport delivery. But I think it's too early to say that the capacity problem and CDN problem have been solved, because there's an awful lot more traffic and users to migrate onto IP-based consumption. There's still a lot of traditional broadcast, terrestrial, or satellite-based consumption that has yet to move to IP. But having said that, the relationships between operators and embedding of CDNs within operator networks has greatly helped. But I think there's definitely more of a focus perhaps now on the application stack supporting the streaming experience and making that super-reliable."
But lest he paint too rosy a picture of present-day streaming QoE, he notes, "We've seen some fairly recent events where that has gone wrong for some new entrants in particular to the live premium sports streaming distribution capability."
Join us May 12-14, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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