Broadcaster works with New Relic for end-to-end infrastructure visibility, successfully scaling to reach 64% of Australia’s population

New Relic, the intelligent observability company, today announced its end-to-end infrastructure monitoring was used by Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) to deliver SBS’s most digitally significant FIFA World Cup™ coverage to date.

SBS reached 64% of the Australian population – 18 million people – across broadcast and digital platforms during this year’s tournament, with no major technical issues. The result comes as SBS confirmed it has secured exclusive Australian broadcast, video, and radio rights to the FIFA World Cup 2030™, extending a partnership with FIFA that first began in 1986.

“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,” said SBS Technical & Strategic Operations Manager Rob Hussey.

Scaling to deliver 146 million uninterrupted broadcast streams for record-breaking audiences

SBS delivered 146 million streams, an increase of 155% from 2022, with concurrent streaming peaking at 1.5 million viewers during the final match. SBS achieved this across 104 live matches – 40 more than in 2022 – placing sustained, record demand on its digital infrastructure throughout the event.

“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,” said Hussey. “This visibility contributed to SBS delivering the tournament with zero major technical issues.”

Built for real-time visibility to scale hybrid systems and third-party services in lockstep

Live sport places a unique strain on streaming infrastructure, as demand can reach many multiples higher than business-as-usual in the minutes before kick-off. SBS's hybrid mix of internally built systems and third-party services means every part of the delivery pipeline had to scale in lockstep. With the infrastructure changing significantly between tournaments, SBS treated testing and monitoring as a first-order priority rather than relying on prior configurations to hold.

Ahead of the tournament, SBS's engineering team built a new unified dashboard within New Relic, which became the team's primary lens on system health across all matches, replacing a more fragmented view of critical services.

Proactively forecasting audience surges without overprovisioning infrastructure 

SBS's data analysts forecast audience growth to pinpoint which matches would likely drive peak demand, enabling the team to scale its infrastructure with enough headroom to handle a surge without overprovisioning at the scale of the World Cup. To validate those forecasts, SBS ran real load tests at projected volumes, using New Relic to monitor throughput and latency across the stack and flag areas for improvement. When issues arose, that component-level visibility let SBS isolate the cause quickly rather than investigating the pipeline end to end.

“SBS set out to deliver its FIFA World Cup coverage at significant scale, and doing that meant treating observability as core infrastructure,” said New Relic Senior Vice President and General Manager for APJ Rob Newell. “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.”

About SBS

SBS holds a unique place in the Australian media, inspiring all Australians to explore, respect and celebrate our diverse world and in doing so, contributes to an inclusive and cohesive society. From its beginnings in 1975, SBS has evolved into a contemporary, multiplatform and multilingual media organisation with a free-to-air TV portfolio spanning five distinctive channels in SBS, National Indigenous Television (NITV), SBS2, SBS Food, and SBS World Movies; an extensive audio content network providing more than 60 culturally and linguistically diverse communities with services in their own language; and an innovative digital offering, including leading streaming destination SBS On Demand, providing a world of programming and live channels to Australians anytime, anywhere, in multiple languages. Visit us at sbs.com.au.