Case Study: National Rugby League achieves faster OTT delivery and higher-quality streaming with Bitmovin

National Rugby League - Customer Case Study

The National Rugby League (NRL), the premier rugby competition in Australia and New Zealand with millions of fans and roughly 3 million match attendees annually, needed to modernize its OTT strategy to drive subscriber growth and deeper fan engagement. Facing a massive, multi-source content inventory (including a 120-year back catalog), duplicated metadata, and time-consuming manual workflows, the NRL sought faster, more automated processing, consistent metadata and permissions, and lower operational costs to get high-quality video to fans more quickly.

By integrating Dalet Flex’s media logistics with Bitmovin’s high-speed encoding, player and analytics via an API wrapper, the NRL automated parallel processing and unified workflows across 30+ sites, apps and platforms. The result: processing and publish times were cut by up to half, parallel encodes increased from 1 to 20+, perceptibly better video quality at lower bitrates, faster time-to-market (helping reach ~100M viewers and #1 on Facebook), expanded distribution and revenue opportunities, and reduced costs while enabling a smaller digital team to maintain operations.

National Rugby League

Quanah McBride

Head of Digital Media Operations