Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) turned to New Relic’s Intelligent Observability Platform to keep its digital infrastructure running during its biggest FIFA World Cup tournament yet, reaching 18 million Australians across broadcast and digital platforms without major technical issues.
The broadcaster delivered 146 million streams across the tournament, up 155 per cent on 2022, as it handled 104 live matches and peak concurrent streaming of 1.5 million viewers during the final.
The figures represent a significant test for SBS’s streaming infrastructure, with 40 more matches than the previous tournament and audience demand capable of surging dramatically in the minutes before kick-off.
To prepare, SBS used New Relic’s end-to-end infrastructure monitoring to track the performance of the systems responsible for delivering its coverage, giving engineers a consolidated view of potential problems before they affected viewers.
“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,” SBS Technical & Strategic Operations Manager Rob Hussey said.
SBS’s technology environment combines internally developed systems with third-party services, meaning a problem in one part of the delivery chain could affect the wider streaming experience.
Ahead of the tournament, its engineering team built a unified dashboard in New Relic to monitor system health across matches, replacing a more fragmented view of critical services.
The dashboard brought together 15 service components and more than 90 metrics, allowing engineers to see how different parts of the streaming pipeline were performing in real time rather than collecting information from separate monitoring systems.
“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,” Hussey said.
The consolidated view also helped the team isolate the source of technical issues more quickly, rather than investigating the entire delivery pipeline.
SBS also used audience forecasting to determine which matches were likely to attract the largest audiences and prepare its infrastructure accordingly.
Its data analysts modelled expected audience growth, helping the team identify where additional capacity would be needed to accommodate demand without overprovisioning infrastructure across the entire tournament.
Those forecasts were tested through load testing at projected audience volumes. New Relic was then used to monitor throughput and latency across the technology stack, helping engineers identify areas that needed improvement before the tournament began.
The approach was particularly important given the changing nature of SBS’s infrastructure between World Cups, with the broadcaster treating testing and monitoring as priorities rather than relying on configurations used during previous tournaments.
New Relic’s monitoring helped SBS maintain visibility across its hybrid infrastructure as demand increased, with the broadcaster reporting no major technical issues during the event.
“SBS set out to deliver its FIFA World Cup coverage at significant scale, and doing that meant treating observability as core infrastructure,” New Relic senior vice president and general manager for APJ Rob 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.”
The results come as SBS looks ahead to the 2030 FIFA World Cup, having secured exclusive Australian broadcast, video and radio rights for the tournament. Its partnership with FIFA dates back to 1986.
