I’ve recently spoken with and presented to more than two dozen last-mile providers, and here’s a list of live streaming events and software downloads they are closely monitoring from a capacity planning standpoint. We’ve recently gotten viewership stats from live events across YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix, so it’s been interesting for me to hear from ISPs and streamers on how they are using recent telemetry data for capacity planning. If you think I missed a potential big traffic event from the list (at least 10M+ AMA), please add it to the comments section.

• YouTube NFL Exclusive, (Sept 5, 19.7M AMA)
• Amazon Prime Video TNF Kickoff, (Sept 11, 17.7M AMA)
• Netflix Canelo vs. Crawford boxing event (Sept 13, 36.6M AMA)
• Battlefield 6 launch (Oct 10)
• Fortnite season, Chapter 6 Season 5 (Nov 1)
• Call of Duty Black Ops 7 launch (Nov 14)
• Netflix Jake Paul vs. Gervonta Davis boxing event (Nov 14)
• ESPN’s WWE premium live events (PLEs), the first one was Sept. 20 (4x per year)
• Netflix’s two NFL games on Christmas (Dec 25)
• YouTube NFL Sunday Ticket (all games until January, final date TBD)
• Amazon Prime Video TNF (all games until Dec. 27)
• NBA Season Long: Monday (Peacock), Tuesday (NBC/Peacock), Wednesday (ESPN), Thursday and Friday (Prime Video), Saturday (ABC/ESPN/Prime Video), Sunday (ABC/ESPN/Prime Video)
• NHL migrating to DAZN for 2025-2026 season (NHL TV no longer doing distribution, so traffic will look different now coming from DAZN)
• Amazon Prime Video NFL Wild Card playoff game (Jan 10 or 11)
• UFC on Paramount+ (2026, 46 events in the year, 13 are major)

One thing to note when comparing live events to previous years is the increasing number of large-scale live events that are now global. Some streamers have the rights to distribute events worldwide, as seen with Netflix’s NFL games on Christmas and YouTube’s coverage of the NFL game from Brazil.

We’ve seen inaccurate statements from some vendors recently regarding CDN services. Achieving a “50% bitrate reduction” doesn’t mean you can automatically “reduce CDN costs by up to 50%.” Beamr and other vendors promote this idea in press releases, such as the one Beamr issued for a demo at IBC, but it’s clear that many vendors don’t understand how CDN contracts work and how the services are purchased. I see this time and again with vendors, with another saying they can deliver video at a “fraction of the cost of traditional CDN,” or at a “lower cost,” but they never talk numbers.

Orange did a blog post about their CDN services in the lead up to IBC, saying that “4K and 8K are becoming the standard,” which is false. Almost no content is available in 4K, and no one is producing 8K content, let alone trying to stream it. The narrative that traffic across CDNs is going to “exponentially grow,” due to use cases involving 4K, 8K, VR or all live broadcast viewership moving from pay TV to streaming, isn’t true. That’s a fact, not my opinion.

I’m all for new ideas in the industry, but an idea alone is not enough. No vendor should start their pitch by making statements of how the current situation doesn’t work well and is broken. Delivering video over the internet today works very well at scale and continues to improve. Too many vendors say they can do better by building the “next generation” of something, at a lower price, with better performance, without any details to back that up, like we’ve seen from Blockcast, which suggests caches should be placed in consumers’ homes. They also say on their website that their solution is needed to help prevent streams of the World Cup Final from “vanishing,” whatever that means.

I see vendors using words to describe the “strength” and “quality” of their networks, with almost none of the vendors detailing capacity, regions deployed, or delivery services supported. Orange says their “footprint is worldwide,” but their delivery map shows coverage in two areas, Europe and Africa. Also, images on their CDN page are broken, above a heading that says their CDN is “reliable.” The entire capacity of Orange’s CDN solution could have handled only 5-7% of the total Tbps of capacity of the last Super Bowl. Quality, reach and capacity must all be discussed together, not independently.

Over the years, the market for delivery services and technology has been littered with vendors who all promised to do it better, at a lower cost, but are now gone. When vendors start making statements of how the current situation doesn’t work well, is broken, and they can do better by building the “next generation” of something, at a lower price, with better performance, without any details to back that up, that’s not good for the industry or for vendors.

The OpenMOQ Software Consortium has launched as a new effort among vendors and content owners, focused on advancing MOQ-based technology through open-source software. The consortium is tasked with developing high-performance software that will enable the next generation of media contribution, distribution, and playback. OpenMOQ is a collaborative effort to accelerate development, enhance interoperability and share cost between vendors, distributors and in some cases, even competitors. In this interview, Will Law from Akamai and Tomas Kvasnicka from CDN77 discuss the formation of OpenMOQ and its goals.

Vimeo has agreed to be acquired by Bending Spoons in an all-cash transaction that values Vimeo at approximately $1.38 billion, equating to $7.85 per share for Vimeo shareholders. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025. At Vimeo’s IPO in 2021, the company’s market cap was approximately $17.8 billion. A year later, Vimeos’ market cap fell under $2 billion and never got back above that number. More to come as more details emerge.

With any acquisition, one could argue that a company paid too much, and much of that is up to personal opinion. Looking at the numbers, Vimeo’s trailing-twelve-month revenue as of June 30 was $415, and they projected double-digit growth by the end of the year. Based on that, Vimeo is paying 3x projected 2025 revenue. However, at the end of Q2, Vimeo had $303 million in cash, so the multiple is more around 2.2x projected 2025 revenue.

I see some comparing Brightcove’s business, which Bending Spoons acquired, to Vimeo, but the companies are very different. At the end of Q3 2024, Brightcove had 1,923 premium customers, paying an average of $8,450 monthly. Outside of premium customers, Brightcove had 469 “starter” customers, paying $350 monthly. For comparison, at the end of Q2 2025, Vimeo’s self-serve plan had 1.5 million customers with an ARPU of $16.16 a month. Their “enterprise” customer count was 4,000 with an ARPU of $2,058 per month. The companies have a different set of customers. In the first 6 months of this year, Vimeo spent $60.9 million in R&D and $63 million in Sales and marketing expenses. General and admin expenses were another $37 million, along with over $14 million in stock-based compensation expenses. There are numerous cost savings that Bending Spoons will take advantage of to lower Vimeo’s costs, also at the expense of employee headcount, which is a business necessity as part of this deal.

A few weeks before the deal was announced, Vimeo laid off 10% of its workforce, which means Vimeo has now laid off 26% of its employees in the past three years, across two different CEOs. Like all vendors, Vimeo has been working hard to improve its balance sheet and net loss, and unfortunately, reducing headcount has been part of that process. In 2022, Vimeo’s net loss for the year was approximately $79.6 million. In 2023, their net loss decreased to $22 million, and in 2024, they reported a positive net income of $27 million. Their balance sheet continues to improve, but at the expense of jobs. Before the deal was announced, Vimeo’s stock was down 22% over the past year and 92% since its IPO.

The rumors of a Paramount Skydance bid for WBD are being overhyped, with many not understanding the difficulty in combining any two independent OTT services. I see many suggesting that combining Paramount+ and HBO Max into one service would allow for “higher ARPU” and benefit from “lower costs” from bundling the two services together. But what many media pundits don’t understand is how video tech stacks work and their complexity. It would take multiple years to combine two services into one if that were the strategy. Just look at how long it took for Disney to enable Hulu content within Disney+, a service they already owned.

Further complicating any integration are the live channels that Paramount+ and HBO Max have, along with the new TNT Sports app currently in development and expected to roll out in April, once the WBD separation happens. Paramount Global could also risk losing what makes each streaming service distinct, if combined, and it’s most likely they would simply bundle the two, not integrate them into one app and service. The company would also have to look at the overlap of consumers across both services, and a bundled discounted price means a lower APRU, not higher. It would be similar to wholesale deals that the OTT providers cut with pay TV providers, where the OTT service is paid less per subscriber each month than they get from selling to consumers directly.

While the WSJ report said a bid is imminent, other news outlets say conversations internally at Paramount Skydance have not gone that far. Irrelevant of who’s right, if Paramount Skydance made an offer for WBD, it would be far from a done deal.

WBD would have to allow time for others to make competitive bids and then review any additional offers. If they were to accept the bid by Paramount Skydance, it would need to be approved by WBD’s board and then shareholders. The deal would also need to be approved by regulators, which may not be easy, considering the current administration is not a fan of CNN. The FCC approved the Paramount and Skydance merger weeks after Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump had filed against the company, which many believe is no coincidence.

It has previously been reported that WBD’s CEO has been discussing offers for CNN and other parts of the debt-laden WBD business, which currently has $35.6 billion in debt. Some pieces of WBD’s business could also be divested even before a bid from Paramount Skydance or anyone else is made, if an offer is indeed coming. Multiple media reports, dating back more than a year, have detailed David Ellison’s interest in WBD as a way to beef up Paramount Skydance’s film slate, so his interest in WBD is not new. What might look good on paper and be easy to suggest is unlikely to be the reality if a deal were to take place.

Open Caching is dead. Like it or not, that’s the truth. The idea of Open Caching made sense on paper, intending to allow ISPs to adopt an open standard framework for on-net eyeballs. It’s a smart idea, but so is multicasting, which was also never widely adopted, amongst many other technologies tied to streaming. What many vendors in the streaming industry forget, or haven’t realized, is that the best technology is not always what gets adopted. It doesn’t matter if you have a better way to ingest, encode, store, deliver or playback video. If customers don’t adopt, implement at scale, and see value in it, then it is not a viable solution in the market. The lack of adoption of Open Caching isn’t a knock on all those who tried to make it work, but time has run out. As an idea, Open Caching was theoretically sound, yet not practical in its implementation.

No large-scale adoption of the technical specification has occurred in the market among content owners, last-mile providers, and CDN vendors. None of the companies that have DIY CDNs for full or partial video delivery, including Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Meta, Prime Video (AWS), WBD, and many others, use or support Open Caching. Content owner Disney supports the spec, but only a small portion of its overall video delivery utilizes Open Caching. Prime Video also uses it for a small portion of its video delivery, via third-party vendors, but AWS itself doesn’t support the spec.

None of the largest third-party CDNs, which make up the majority of the market, including Akamai, Fastly, CDN77, AWS, Google Media CDN, Cloudflare, Microsoft, Gcore, and MainStreaming, support Open Caching on their network. The Open Caching spec was never widely adopted and has never contributed to delivering even 1% of all video bits delivered over the internet in any given year. A few network operators have utilized the Open Caching specification, but none of them have publicly disclosed the cost of deploying it or the amount of traffic they have supported. Privately, Telefonica, Airtel, and others have shared Tbps numbers with me, and they are small. Some vendors that sell delivery solutions to telcos, carriers, and last-mile networks support or supported the Open Caching spec, including Qwilt, Vecima, ATEME, Broadpeak, Synamedia, and others; however, their combined revenue for video delivery using the spec was 1% or less of the total market for third-party CDN delivery services in 2023. See market sizing at cdnmarket.com

While proponents of Open Caching have consistently listed the benefits as being more cost-effective, scalable, and providing a better experience for consumers, these claims have not been proven at scale. For large-scale live streaming events produced by Prime Video, FOX, Paramount, DAZN, and WBD, among others, no Open Caching solution has been utilized as the primary CDN in a multi-CDN strategy, nor has it accounted for even 25% of the overall traffic during an event. Some suggest that Open Caching can “reduce overall operational expenses,” but numbers have never been shared by any customers utilizing Open Caching, since discussing cost savings without also considering scale is irrelevant. Part of the problem is that many years of predictions of higher bitrates, large volumes of 4K video, all linear TV going online and VR applications, among others, never materialized. Encoding was optimized even further, bitrates decreased, and codecs improved, all the while, consumers didn’t see the value in paying for higher-quality video. The QoE of video got “good enough.”

Those who sell the idea of Open Caching often use words like “scale,” but when it comes to scaling infrastructure of any kind, it is easy for someone to say a solution can handle “large spikes,” but that’s just a marketing term. Quality, scale, performance, etc., are all just words with no meaning if not defined with numbers. Open Caching was also intended to enable large content owners to reduce their CDN costs; however, the rapid rate of price compression with traditional CDNs rendered Open Caching unnecessary. By my estimates, starting in 2022, Open Caching began to cost more per unit than using a third-party CDN, as pricing reached $0.0006 and has since fallen to $0.00045, its lowest point, which is only available to the largest customers — those that Open Caching was targeting. When CDNs lowered their prices without requiring higher traffic commitments, or didn’t need any commitments at all, the value of deploying Open Caching significantly diminished.

For some, Open Caching was a dream as a way to capture big content’s attention and localize it on their ASN, sharing in a revenue stream. However, the revenue-sharing model, which has been hyped for many years, has proven to be a myth and has never materialized. The idea of sharing cache resources across content providers has always been attractive, but that’s all it was — an idea in theory, but not in practice.

While the live stream of the Super Bowl broadcast receives a lot of media attention due to its high viewership, events that last longer and are delivered in multiple countries around the world have more complex streaming pipelines. Across 30 days, DAZN live-streamed 63 matches of the FIFA Club World Cup for free in 200 markets, exclusively on its platform, while also enabling sublicensing to local free-to-air networks, combining the agility of digital platforms with the reach of traditional linear broadcasters. This model is unique in the sports media landscape, striking a balance between commercial value and accessibility.

The broadcasting of the tournament was the result of a groundbreaking partnership between DAZN and FIFA, which combined DAZN’s innovative technology platform with FIFA’s commitment to making football truly global. DAZN delivered record-breaking audiences across its platform, as hundreds of millions of viewers watched the tournament. Across the event, viewers watched 12.2 billion minutes on tens of millions of unique devices. Here’s an inside look at DAZN’s entire video tech stack, with numbers and data from ingestion to playback.

The games were available as Freemium and Premium titles on the DAZN app across connected TVs, phones, tablets, streaming devices, game consoles and web browsers, allowing fans to tailor their viewing experience. The Freemium experience was available in HD SDR and Stereo with ads. For paying DAZN subscribers, they got an enhanced viewing experience with HDR, Dolby Audio 5.1 surround sound, reduced advertising, and exclusive highlights and content. With both the free and paid options, all 63 games of the tournament were broadcast in 24 variants, featuring customized advertising and available in multiple languages across more than 200 markets, making it the most accessible club football tournament ever.

DAZN said the acquisition of global rights created a unified experience across its markets, generating efficiency in marketing, product design and distribution. It also enabled DAZN to tell a consistent story and build truly global sponsorship opportunities, while attracting new users and deepening customer engagement in established markets.

FIFA captured the Club World Cup games in 1080p 59.94 HLG and 5.1 surround sound. Feeds from the venue were acquired by the International Broadcast Centre (IBCC), with FIFA and Host Broadcast Services (HBS) managing operations from this location. For the FIFA Club World Cup, the IBCC was located between MetLife Stadium and the Meadowlands Racetrack in East Rutherford, NJ. The feed distribution from this location was provided by Telstra via multiple dedicated 10 Gbps contribution networks from Verizon, with backup satellite uplinks from the venue and the IBCC by Eurovision.

The feeds from IBCC reached the DAZN Match Centre facility in Dallas, which was built and operated by the NEP Group for the FIFA Club World Cup. It functioned as a comprehensive production hub for acquiring feeds from the IBCC and managing feed distribution between DAZN’s partner studios in the US, Mexico, the UK, and DAZN’s regional production facilities in Tokyo, Munich, Milan, and Madrid. The DAZN Match Centre facility was also responsible for Vision Mixing between studio and live footage, graphics insertion, and mixing all regional audio commentary into the live footage to create 27 feed variants per game. Languages supported included English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Hebrew.

DAZN’s playout facility provided a TX function for real-time graphics, ad insertion, promos, SCTE for downstream DAI workflows and DAZN internal services, as well as legal slates insertion. DAZN expanded its capacity by 150% for the FIFA Club World Cup tournament, building new European regions to accommodate 108 concurrent events at any one time, as well as nearly 3,045 unique events. The number of channels was scaled to provide 108 channels in HDR10 Dolby Audio 5.1 and SDR stereo. DAZN’s network infrastructure was upgraded to receive and distribute 70 Gbps of new traffic for the FIFA Club World Cup. Additionally, the company increased the resilience per event by running dual TX channels, making the FIFA Club World Cup highly available and highly resilient.

There were forty-eight produced feeds in HDR10 with Dolby Audio 5.1 and SDR stereo that were delivered to DAZN’s central infrastructure via four newly provisioned 100 Gbps dedicated fiber lines for playout, OTT encoding and distribution. SRT backup feeds in SDR stereo from the DAZN match centre were also available as needed. Amagi was DAZN’s partner, providing playout capabilities for regional ads, SCTE, and graphics insertion in the Premium and Freemium feeds. M2A Media and MediaKind handled the transcoding and packaging, utilizing a multi-CDN strategy to deliver the streams globally on DAZN’s platform.

DAZN’s bitrate ladder for the Freemium feed ranged from 480×288 at 288 Kbps to 1280×720 at 3 Mbps. The frame rate was 29.97, using the Main H.264 profile with CBR rate control, 3 B-frames, and BT.709 colorspace. For the Premium stream, DAZN’s bitrate ladder ranged from 640×360 at 500 Kbps to 1920×1080 at 8 Mbps. The frame rate was 59.94, using the Main10 H.265 profile with a capped VBR or CBR rate control, a 1-second buffer, and BT.2020 colorspace, in HDR10 dynamic range. MPEG-DASH segments were chunked into 3.008s for video and 3.008s for audio, and HLS video segments were 6.003s for video and 6.008s for audio. DAZN utilized both the EC-3 and AAC-LC codecs for audio, with bitrates ranging from 64 kbps to 256 kbps, and a sampling rate of 48 kHz.

DAZN relied on AWS Europe, AWS US, and AWS Asia, as well as its partners at M2A Media and Mediakind in Azure Europe, for live stream generation in Premium HDR10 Dolby Audio 5.1 and Freemium SDR stereo. A highly cached playback service was created to handle the global Freemium traffic. This included running on Fastly’s Edge, which manipulated the playback response to tailor CDN selection and validated user tokens. DAZN worked closely with its CDN partners, including Akamai, Fastly and Amazon CloudFront, to increase the capacity needed for a global audience. DAZN also used new CDN suppliers that were onboarded to cover areas where DAZN expected a higher audience, including Google Media CDN, Gcore, Cloudflare, CacheFly, BytePlus and Raiway.

DAZN developed a new CDN balancing tool to work alongside DAZN’s partner Conviva, and DAZN reached 31 Tbps at peak CDN capacity, with third-party CDNs delivering 96% of all streams for the event. While DAZN has a DIY CDN, built with MainStreaming, only 4% of the streams were delivered from DAZN’s caches, as traffic primarily came from countries where DAZN is not deployed. For reference, DAZN’s DIY CDN has 88 points of presence, with nearly 200 servers in total.

DAZN utilized three monitoring facilities for the FIFA Club World Cup, located in Leeds, Bangor, and Hyderabad. A brand-new MCR was built to accommodate the increased number of events and to enhance monitoring capabilities, including HDR10 and Dolby Audio 5.1. DAZN utilised TAG MCS in addition to its existing TAG deployment to make monitoring more efficient and targeted, allowing the operator to focus on each event. Video playback performance was monitored using a combination of DAZN’s in-house monitoring tool and Conviva. Mexico and the United States were the top two countries by stream count, by a factor of two times more than the third and fourth countries, Argentina and France. Spain, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Portugal and the United Kingdom rounded out the top ten.

Globally, viewer feedback on DAZN’s stream was positive on social media, as well as in my testing with the live stream. Due to the scale at which it had to deliver the tournament and the customization it offered for video quality and multiple languages on various devices, I think DAZN’s delivery of the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup was a great success. Live events that last a few hours, from one location, delivered to one region, while complex, are not nearly as hard as what DAZN successfully pulled off with the FIFA Club World Cup stream.

The tournament also marks the start of DAZN’s broader partnership with FIFA, which extends to the integration of FIFA+ content on DAZN’s platform. This transforms DAZN into a comprehensive global hub for football, extending beyond a live-streaming service.

My thanks to DAZN for providing me with a detailed and inside look at their video workflow, access to select data (including viewership numbers I can’t disclose) and for their willingness to share these details with the larger industry. Note: DAZN did not compensate me in any way for writing this post.