Case Study: Enlighten Designs achieves reliable, scalable, cost-effective live sports streaming with Amazon Web Services

Enlighten Designs - Customer Case Study

Enlighten Designs, a Hamilton-based web design firm founded in 1998 that serves medium to large enterprises and government clients, needed a way to stream high-profile live sporting events (including a New Zealand–Pakistan cricket series and the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics) beyond the capacity of its Auckland-based infrastructure. Their single streaming platform lacked the bandwidth to handle peak loads, and purchasing and staffing physical hardware to cover demand would have cost tens of thousands of dollars and carried significant uncertainty.

The team deployed Amazon EC2 instances as an overflow streaming platform, using an origin server with multiple edge servers, a load balancer, Wowza Media Server delivering RTMP over HTTPS, and ElasticFox for real‑time scaling. The AWS approach enabled fast, low-cost deployments, reliable live streams, predictable pricing for client quotes, and the ability to scale on demand—results that reduced infrastructure costs dramatically and increased the company’s confidence in offering cloud-backed streaming to future clients.

Enlighten Designs

Travis Houghton

Sales Manager