ITV deploys Fastly’s Media Shield
September 9, 2024
Fastly, the edge cloud platform has announced the expansion of its partnership with ITV to include the use of Fastly’s Media Shield. The decision was made in the run up to ITVX’s biggest ever live-streaming event during Euro 2024, and allowed ITVX to scale up to handle millions of concurrent live-stream viewers during England’s semi-final against the Netherlands, resulting in the highest live-stream audience of the tournament for a single broadcaster.
Having invested significantly in its live-streaming offering, ITVX eclipsed its previous record of 11 million streams across its British streaming hubs which was achieved during the Euro 2020 semi-final. The weeks of the competition saw a total traffic of 124.26 petabytes being passed through Media Shield to support the Euros and Love Island streams.
This partnership builds on the successful implementation of Fastly as one of ITV’s CDN providers during the 2022 World Cup. Fastly was first brought in to support ITVX’s engineering team in providing additional network bandwidth in the run up to the 2022 tournament. ITVX needed to expand capacity in order to ease concerns about the expected rise in viewers.
The agility of Fastly’s operations allowed ITVX to quickly redirect traffic when needed and cope when scaling up rapidly, delivering consistent streaming performance to a then record-breaking viewership. ITVX incorporated Fastly further into its platform as a result of this success, leading to Fastly being called on again as a trusted partner for Euro 2024.
Implementing Media Shield behind ITV’s multi-CDN deployment boosted the performance of live streams in both quality and resilience, with ITV’s mean for 503’s through Fastly during the Euro’s was <0.01 per cent. Media Shield’s request collapsing function meant that ITVX was able to process requests reliably during periods of demand. Origin traffic was reduced, easing pressures on the origin infrastructure and preventing unnecessary egress fees.
Mark Ison, Director of Engineering at ITV, commented: “Streaming during these moments where the whole nation is locked in is all or nothing. We need to deliver during every second of play, and after the last World Cup we knew that Fastly was the right partner to further boost our streaming infrastructure in time for the first kick off. Media Shield was powerful enough to process the most demand we’ve ever dealt with, but also incredibly easy for us to plug in and use. Our strong viewing share was testament to the quality of stream our vendors helped us to provide.”
Kip Compton, Chief Product Officer at Fastly, added: “The speed and ease of use of our products is where we can bring real value to our streaming partners, and following the success of our first venture with ITVX, it was extremely gratifying for our team that we were selected again. Media Shield is designed to take the load off of the system and seamlessly deal with sudden increases in requests, and the result was a high-quality stream with a level of reliability that outshone the competition. We’re delighted to have played a part in taking this tournament a step further than what ITV had seen before.”