AWS for M&E Blog
FOX continues to deliver record-breaking Super Bowl broadcasts with AWS
While the National Football League (NFL) may be in the offseason, the FOX digital video platform team is already planning for the next Super Bowl broadcast. Raising the bar, yet again, will be no small feat considering FOX’s Super Bowl LIX stream shattered previous records.
In preparing for Super Bowl LIX, the FOX digital video platform team faced critical challenges. They needed to deliver broadcast-quality streaming to more than 24 million unique viewers, while maintaining the lowest possible latency across platforms. Additionally, FOX needed to support, at scale, streaming in 4K, while ensuring 100 percent uptime during the year’s most watched sporting event. Not only did they meet these ambitious goals, but they also garnered a massive audience, with an assist from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“Our success wouldn’t have happened without the close collaboration between FOX and AWS,” FOX Digital Platform Team Senior Vice President, Mayur Srinivasan, shared. “And not just for this year. Through their enhanced support offering, the team of media-specialized support experts has been our trusted partner for several years, helping optimize our video workflow for maximum quality, minimum latency, and exceptional reliability. Our continued success has been a buildup of efforts as we optimize our core video stack and constantly improve the viewing experience. Latency and quality are an ongoing mission for all of us.”
Establishing strong foundations
The NFL is amongst the most-watched live sports in the United States and the Super Bowl is the biggest game of the year. With stakes that high, reliability is paramount, which is why Srinivasan and his team started prepping for Super Bowl LIX nearly ten months ahead of time. The team of media specialized support experts at AWS were key to the planning, load testing, and capacity fulfillment needs of such a large event. Expecting to exceed the previous year’s viewership, they began architecture and operational reviews in the summer, with AWS providing input on configurations and developing new features to meet FOX’s needs. Building on this robust groundwork, AWS partnered with FOX to provide end-to-end dedicated proactive monitoring and support during the event, helping FOX deliver a rock-solid streaming experience that withstood the pressure of record-breaking viewership.
Along with tuning the video tech stack, FOX began building what would become the Media Cloud Video Beaconing Service (MCVBS) to track viewer concurrency. FOX used Momento Gateway, Momento Cache, and Amazon Athena, backed by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to create the robust solution. MCVBS enabled FOX to better measure its audience and understand their device preference for watching the game. It’s helped FOX from an operational perspective and provided real-time insights on viewing behaviors. They can now measure how much of the audience is viewing on mobile devices compared with smart TVs or in 4K compared to HD.
Core tech stack elements
For Super Bowl LIX, FOX ingested video feeds into its ecosystem. FOX used AWS Elemental MediaLive for distribution encoding for both 1080p and 4K workflows and AWS Elemental MediaStore as origin. FOX captured the game in 1080p HDR, then upscaled to 4K. Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) protected the origin and served as a backup shield option. FOX also used Amazon CloudFront as part of it’s multi-CDN strategy.
“We’ve worked very closely with the AWS team to ensure that we’re delivering video streaming at optimal quality to all these devices with MediaLive. AWS helps us support large scale events and gives us the ability to process video in multiple regions so that we can have resiliency and scale very efficiently,” said Srinivasan.
From a backend orchestration standpoint, the FOX video APIs are built on AWS infrastructure in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Additionally, FOX uses many third-party tools and systems for things like observability that are driven by AWS.
“All of our deployments are done on very efficient architecture. We thoroughly load tested our video backend and APIs for scale using AWS infrastructure,” Srinivasan explained. “AWS plays a huge role for us, not just within our core ecosystem, but also across other third-party vendors.”
One of FOX’s four CDNs, Amazon CloudFront, carried the largest amount of Super Bowl LIX streaming traffic. “Amazon CloudFront was one of our best performing CDNs on the day of the Super Bowl,” said Srinivasan. “We had already done capacity reservations, but when the audience grew beyond our expectations, the Amazon CloudFront team made sure we had the extra capacity that we needed to deliver to that large scale audience.”
FOX team monitors the live stream for Super Bowl LIX.
Elevating the viewing experience
While reliability and low latency are always prioritized by FOX for the Super Bowl broadcasts, Srinivasan also wanted to boost the network’s 4K streaming performance for this year. Ultimately, 28 percent of streaming viewers watched the game in 4K, with almost no rebuffering.
“Our customers expect great quality video with as low latency as possible for sports. At the same time more devices are supporting 4K, while the audience size is growing. All these factors kept us on our toes as we evolved our architecture to improve the stack,” Srinivasan noted.
Key optimizations for the Super Bowl LIX streaming broadcast included dialing in the bit rate ladder to deliver the highest possible quality with the lowest number of bits. The FOX team had multiple sessions with AWS to refine the 4K encoder settings. The team also focused on the multi-CDN decisioning, and improved player metrics for an enhanced end user experience. Additionally, FOX invested heavily in new observability tools to have better stack visibility and maintain operational excellence.
Ahead of the big game, FOX stress tested the video infrastructure on several smaller scale events. They simulated millions of users by conducting parallel load tests, ensuring the system remained stable with high demand. The team also conducted extensive chaos testing, implementing worst case scenarios and resolving them as quickly as possible.
Constantly moving the goal post
Though thrilled with the success of Super Bowl LIX, Srinivasan is already considering how to next improve the FOX video tech stack. A near term goal is to make the entire video infrastructure 1080p-compatible. He’s also looking at how to leverage protocols, like Secure Reliable Transmission (SRT). Generative AI- or machine learning-powered tools could additionally be used for things like auto captioning. Whatever path FOX chooses next, AWS will remain a key partner in its video tech stack evolution.
“AWS is one of our primary partners in terms of ensuring that things work as expected for each Super Bowl. I’m super impressed, as always, how AWS tracked our progress across the various milestones, and ensured that we kept everything on track,” concluded Srinivasan. “AWS has such expertise in the media streaming space and runs many critical pieces in our ecosystem. I’m confident that we have assembled and built such an efficient, successful video streaming system with AWS as our key partner.”
With an ongoing partnership and infrastructure built around AWS Media Services and Amazon CloudFront, FOX is perpetually primed to score big viewing wins.
Learn more about live video streaming with AWS Media Services, or get in touch with an AWS for Media & Entertainment video expert.