Case Study: Tennis Australia achieves sub-500ms delivery to 1.2 million global users at the Australian Open with Ably

Tennis Australia relies on Ably to deliver live experiences for millions of tennis fans worldwide

Tennis Australia, owner of the Australian Open (aired live in 220+ territories and reaching over 900 million homes), needed a new data-transfer partner to deliver real-time scores, updates and commentary to millions of global fans. They required a platform that could support older devices without WebSocket support, handle unpredictable, massive demand spikes, and meet a strict performance target — independently load‑tested against PubNub, Pusher and AWS IoT — to consistently broadcast messages to 1.2 million users within 500ms (95th percentile). Ably was selected as the only provider that met these requirements.

Ably implemented a globally redundant solution with multi-region failover, intelligent client routing, 24/7 monitoring and support, cross-platform SDKs with fallbacks (HTTP streaming, XHR, JSONP) and a History API so the latest match scores were available the moment a page loaded. The result: Ably met Tennis Australia’s performance targets in 2018, delivered uninterrupted real-time updates for millions of users, protected advertising revenue, and “delivered without a hitch,” consistently achieving the 1.2 million users/500ms benchmark.

Tennis Australia

Jeremy Keech

PMO Manager