SBS sees unprecedented online traffic during 2014 FIFA World Cup

Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), official broadcast partner of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, has partnered with Akamai to deliver an unprecedented amount of online traffic during the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil over the last month. 

C+T reports that in the lead up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup, SBS enlisted Akamai to provide additional support to manage the predicted increase in demand for its services.

“We expected to see a significant increase in online viewers with the 2014 World Cup and our predictions have not been wrong. To date, SBS has experienced an unprecedented volume of traffic streaming videos from our websites and dedicated application. In a single day of the 2014 World Cup, we had already experienced more than a quarter of our typical monthly video bandwidth delivery figures. It has broken SBS records for any event we have streamed online by 750 percent,” commented Matt Costain, Technical Director, Online at SBS.

The special arrangements put in place specifically for the 2014 FIFA World Cup ensured SBS could handle the increase in traffic volumes. In particular, it provided the ability to offload traffic, as well as access to a dedicated 24/7 event support team, offering an extra layer of assistance to ensure there was 100 percent uptime.

During the first two weeks of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, SBS recorded peak traffic during Australia’s match against Chile, with 103,000Mbps, which is expected to increase with the grand final.

“We are pleased SBS has reaped the full benefits our solutions have to offer and been able to deliver reliable, consistently high-quality experiences to its end users,” commented David Habben, Chief Media Strategist, APJ at Akamai.