The 2026 men’s football World Cup marked the ascendency of Spain and the international swan song of Lionel Messi, but it was also the most technologically enabled of its kind – especially in terms of how it was watched. In the UK, broadcaster ITV has revealed how it turned to advanced networking technology to safeguard its broadcasts.
Specifically, to help eliminate telemetry delays that threaten live-streaming operations during massive sporting events, ITV deployed Akamai’s TrafficPeak end-to-end observability system, powered by the Hydrolix real-time data platform for operational intelligence at internet scale.
The World Cup is the most watched event on Earth, and with final detailed figures yet to be released, it is expected that 2026’s event was viewed by more than six billion people worldwide. This compares with around 5.1 billion people for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
The 2026 event featured, for the first time, 48 national football teams, playing 104 games in 16 stadiums in the US, Canada and Mexico. At the heart of its technological infrastructure was a technical operations centre in Miami, forming an IT and networking nexus that worked alongside an international broadcast centre in Dallas, which distributed live match feeds in 4K video quality to more than 200 countries, such as ITV in the UK.
World Cup coverage generated more than 200 million streams on ITVX, the broadcaster’s digital streaming video channel, making it the most-streamed sporting event in ITVX history. The England vs Norway match alone peaked at nearly five million concurrent streams.
In addition, World Cup coverage on ITV Sport’s YouTube channel captured 153 million views to date, more than double the channel’s total for the whole of 2025, while the Fan Zone experience on the ITVX mobile app delivered 33.4 million total sessions across the tournament. “There’s absolutely no margin for error when delivering an event of this magnitude,” said Mark Ison, director of engineering for video at ITV.
By running TrafficPeak on Akamai Cloud, ITV could overcome traditional log latency gaps of five to 15 minutes, gaining the real-time observability across its multi-content delivery network (CDN) environment required to instantly isolate network bottlenecks and protect critical ad revenues on ITVX.
Integrated directly into ITV’s existing media delivery and security infrastructure, the system provided critical insight during live tournament matches. ITV’s Network Operations Centre used the real-time processing to pinpoint where localised streaming anomalies were originating on third-party internet service provider (ISP) networks rather than ITV’s core architecture.
Akamai also revealed that ITV engineers could instantly distinguish between core platform health and last-mile transit bottlenecks to mitigate delivery risks before they impacted national viewers. In addition, concurrently, security teams employed real-time log ingestion to detect unauthorised access clusters and protect exclusive broadcasting rights.
To support the tournament’s massive telemetry demands, ITV operated TrafficPeak as a managed service deployed directly on ITV’s broadcast cloud infrastructure. ITV ran containerised Kubernetes clusters on Akamai’s global compute footprint. Akamai claimed the broadcaster was able to have achieved sub-second log ingestion with complete operational flexibility while eliminating the higher costs of some legacy third-party tools.
“We added TrafficPeak to our workflow so we could move from a reactive troubleshooting posture to a proactive, real-time footing when it mattered most,” added Ison. “The instant visibility was a critical insurance policy that helped ensure a flawless viewing experience across the UK and protected our ad revenue over the course of the 104-match tournament.”
Looking at the need for tools for such events, Akamai senior vice-president of sales and channels and managing director for EMEA Natalie Billingham stressed that broadcasters preparing for tier-one global sporting events such as ITV require visibility tools that scale dynamically without adding heavy operational friction.
“ITV proved that high-velocity telemetry can be analysed and acted upon in real time at a fraction of the complexity of legacy architectures,” she said. “We are proud to expand our relationship with ITV to help power and protect their most critical broadcasting moments.
Coralie Seuzaret, senior solutions engineer at Hydrolix, said: “Millions of viewers of ITV’s live events generate telemetry at a rate that most log pipelines aren’t built to keep up with. TrafficPeak [gave ITV] access to its entire access log data, in real time, so ITV teams can catch delivery problems before viewers do. It allows ITV to protect broadcast revenues when stakes are high.”
