What It Takes to Power World Cup Livestreams on a Massive Global Scale: A Q&A with Deltatre COO Gilles Mas
This year’s FIFA World Cup was the most watched in history. Throughout the preceding month, audiences numbering in the millions across the globe tuned into match after match, setting new viewership records at both the local and worldwide level.
Even with viewership at an all-time high and the largest-ever array of digital and streaming platforms carrying the live action, the tournament ran from start to finish without a single major streaming outage. So what does it actually take to design and deploy streaming technology sophisticated enough to deliver this kind of global sporting event flawlessly?
Deltatre, the global technology firm that supported World Cup live streaming for a range of rights holders and broadcasters spanning Europe, Asia, and the Americas, operates as one of the most influential technology partners working behind the curtain throughout the sports and media industry. Its platform underpins the digital and streaming experiences of major players like the NFL, MLB, UFC, NHL, MLS, BBC Studios (BritBox), AMC Global Media, Rogers, and Bell Media, among others.
During the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Deltatre operated the broadcasting and streaming infrastructure for a number of major rights holders' World Cup platforms worldwide. In this Q&A, Gilles Mas, Chief Operating Officer at Deltatre, discusses the challenges and intricacies of pulling off this achievement and what this success means for the future of large-scale livestreaming events.
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Gilles Mas, Chief Operating Officer at Deltatre
How far ahead did Deltatre begin preparing to handle large-scale live streaming coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup to ensure a seamless delivery of coverage for major broadcaster and streaming platforms? What were some of the essential initial steps for a proper build-out?
Deltatre has underpinned the streaming and digital platforms, and data and graphics solutions, for a substantial list of the world’s broadcasters, media companies, and federations connected to this tournament for decades.
Commercial timing is the real constraint on any tournament project with client decisions on scope sometimes landing later than the technical work would like, which compresses what would ideally be a 12-month ramp-up into roughly six or less months.
That said, for a client partner already on our roster, a World Cup build-out is rarely a new platform – it's an addition of capacity and new features to the proven infrastructure that is already in place.
A compressed runway often breaks down into two to three months of engineering work – itself only possible because our product architecture is mature enough to configure rather than rebuild – then an intense and important phase for certification with app stores and connected TV platforms.
The less visible early work is modeling concurrent audience load across time zones, agreeing data and rights workflows with partners, and getting new app versions through review with Apple, Google, Samsung, Roku, and beyond well before kickoff.
What are a few examples of contingencies and processes beyond Deltatre’s control with this large-scale project? How did Deltatre anticipate and plan for them? Could you discuss some of the unprecedented complexities for streaming this year’s World Cup?
Things can go wrong outside our infrastructure, and that has to be designed around. We plan for redundancy – multiple CDN and cloud paths, fallback routes built into the streaming architecture, and monitoring that catches degradation before a viewer does.
Two other pressures sit largely outside Deltatre's control. App store and device certification runs on its own timeline – Apple, Google, Roku, and the smart TV and console makers have a lot going on, so updates need to be submitted and iterated on well in advance. And because production-scale cloud infrastructure is expensive to run, some rights holders are reluctant to provision it months ahead of time, so genuine end-to-end validation at full scale can in some instances happen very close to the tournament getting underway.
Also, what's genuinely different about this World Cup is the geography, with three host nations and more venues and time zones than any prior edition.
How did Deltatre work to deliver a seamless experience across the vast networks of CTV, mobile, and desktop apps that offered access to the FIFA World Cup?
All of our products share an underlying purpose to ensure fragmentation is invisible to fans.
Our Deltatre AXIS platform, for example, has been making it easy for our national broadcaster and telecom clients worldwide to set up, manage, test, target, schedule, and publish their World Cup experiences across the devices their country’s fans are expecting.
Deltatre AXIS
A seamless experience for fans requires an editorial console that is straightforward for our clients’ non-technical operators to use, so we ensured that we were catering to the enormous spectrum of devices, operating systems, and internal client team user types.
This is necessary if you want to be prepped and optimized for a tournament with such a schedule, the geography with three host nations, and more venues and time zones than any prior edition.
Then, Deltatre NEXUS is taking things one step further by bringing the editorial experience of traditional websites together with streaming video experience – and all with one login for the fan, meaning they have everything they need, optimized per device, no matter what screen they are on.
Deltatre NEXUS
For broadcasters running their own existing billing or video systems, we obviously integrated everything into one consistent experience across devices, including ad insertion – the same approach that already underpins a number of Deltatre's broadcast and federation partners' connected TV apps well beyond this tournament.
On the very real challenge of device fragmentation, we all know that some manufacturers run multiple incompatible variants of their own platforms, with sharply different hardware capability even within one brand's product line. We have extensive device-testing labs containing more than a decade’s worth of hardware, and improvements we make as we go benefit multiple clients on our platforms at once, rather than being solved client by client.
Why is it important to have human experts in place to operate alongside the tech to ensure that each part of the system functions properly?
Eyes on glass matter in our experience; live sport can't only be monitored by software watching software alone. The big moments in sporting history need experienced engineers watching much of the chain or the whole chain in real time.
An app or a live streaming experience that fails on a device may have no fallback, unlike broadcast television, where operators may be able to cut to a backup feed. An unsupervised OTT or digital experience that breaks could take the match viewing experience from a fan entirely.
The same human judgment matters when we are planning too. Navigating app store and device certification processes that are often opaque and slow-moving requires people who understand how those systems behave and when to escalate.
I led digital operations at UEFA before joining Deltatre, and all of this tech and sport-specific experience is what makes the difference between an operation or product that holds up and impresses under a flagship tournament's intensity and one that doesn't.
What role does AI play in helping to augment human oversight in large-scale livestreaming events such as this year’s World Cup?
Machine learning and AI have been playing a role at Deltatre for a few years. This has been across streaming and digital user analytics, AI-driven workflows that create data-rich contextually relevant TV graphics, data-to-text content generation for blogs and text-based content sections on DTC websites and apps, and for significant solutions, including player tracking and data extraction for major leagues in some of the biggest stadiums in the world.
What it isn't doing yet is the last 20 percent– the architectural judgment and edge-case handling that make something robust enough for a live, flagship event.
But AI is doing plenty of routine engineering work – reviewing code at a scale no team could do manually, catching security issues, handling repetitive builds.
I don't see this changing in the next few years, and our Chief Product Officer, Alex Gruber, who is based in our New York hub, was recently sharing his observations with me on a parallel shift on the product side, where he is demonstrating that AI is increasingly allowing our clients’ non-technical teams to query platform data in plain language rather than waiting on a report, alongside how AI is supporting more contextual advertising by assessing what's actually happening in a stream, and more.
The decisions and assuagements that carry real consequence during this, and any live tournament, remain with our people.
Could you discuss some of Deltatre’s Innovative Technology Solutions (such as Deltatre NEXUS, VESPER, AXIS, and FORGE), and the unique ways they help support live event streaming?
Deltatre AXIS offers a live-event control layer – combining orchestration, UI/UX, and content management – that enables telcos, broadcasters, and other organizations to manage linear-to-OTT handoffs and in-event content updates without juggling separate systems.
Deltatre VESPER and Deltatre AXIS are both built for concurrency at scale – designed to absorb the spike-and-crash traffic patterns unique to live sports and events.
Deltatre FORGE turns live moments into retention. Its digital website and app layer is retention-first, meaning the value lies not only in streaming the event, but also in keeping fans engaged through second-screen content, stats overlays, and personalization before and after the final whistle.
Deltatre NEXUS bridges acquisition and retention in a single product. As a hybrid FORGE/VESPER offering, it enables a client partner to run OTT delivery and the editorial fan-engagement experience as one connected stack, rather than stitching together two vendors for a live event. Beyond the AI and machine learning functionality already available across our products, the Deltatre Innovation Lab is running multiple AI pilots focused on live-event pain points – with practical applications such as AI-assisted personalization and content operations, rather than novelty features.
How does Deltatre help media organizations amplify their storytelling via data, graphics, and officiating?
No other company in the world combines officiating technology with streaming, digital, and data and graphics under one roof – most specialize in one or two pieces.
Our data and graphics teams manage millions of data points a year and can produce over 100,000 visualizations a day across more than 30 sports, turning raw statistics into something that helps broadcasters explain, in the moment, why a match is turning.
Our multi-year partnership with ATP Media, for instance, moved tennis broadcasting forward by introducing AI-driven workflows that now create data-rich, contextually relevant TV graphics far beyond the show courts, and all delivered 18 months ahead of schedule.
On officiating, Deltatre's joint venture [with Bundesliga] Sportec Solutions is one of only two providers worldwide holding FIFA Quality Pro certification, delivering VAR, goal-line technology, semi-automated offside technology, and virtual offside line systems.
The same data that helps an official make a confident call is often what feeds the graphic explaining that call to millions of viewers moments later.
What are some advantages that streamers and broadcasters can gain to help reduce preparation time, complexities, and costs by working with technology partners such as Deltatre to optimize global live events?
Without a product like what Deltatre offers, it could take eighteen months or even longer to create something at the standard and robustness required for the World Cup or similar, and it will cost roughly ten times as much.
The latest generation of Deltatre's architecture has even further reduced the time it takes to deploy a tournament-scale build-out to just months.
Our platform is amortized across many clients, where a one-off build carries none of that. A shared platform absorbs the cost of testing and maintaining support for a genuinely fragmented device landscape once, with other clients benefiting rather than each rights holder solving connected TV fragmentation on its own.
It's the same reason a roster that spans the NFL, NHL, MLB, MLS, UFC, WWE, Bell Media, Rogers, Sky, BBC Studios, DR, Mediacorp, UEFA, ATP, ICC, and dozens of others choose to run on our products.
We really like that rights holders on our products – whether large or small – can all benefit from our scale and continuous innovation.
But the advantage isn't only time and cost, as going at it alone without specific products and major sporting or similar event experience is highly naive. This is mission-critical stuff, and without our experience and tech, many would collapse under a live event at this scale.
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