Case Study: BBC delivers live UHD sports coverage with AWS Elemental

BBC delivers live, UHD coverage of UEFA Euros and Wimbledon with AWS

BBC needed a resilient, high-quality workflow to deliver live UHD coverage of major summer sports events, including the UEFA Euro 2020 final and Wimbledon, while meeting record audience demand on BBC iPlayer. To support this, the broadcaster worked with AWS Elemental and its Live UHD encoders to ensure a premium viewing experience across live broadcasts and streaming platforms.

AWS Elemental helped BBC build a robust UHD delivery architecture with synchronized feeds, HEVC encoding, HDR support, and multiple failover paths using redundant encoders, packagers, and CDNs such as Amazon CloudFront. As a result, BBC streamed UHD content 4.2 million times across the two events, reached peak audiences of 25 million for Euro 2020 and 7.8 million for Wimbledon, and received positive viewer feedback on the quality of the coverage.

BBC

Jim Simmons

Executive Product Manager