Case Study: The National Rugby League accelerates OTT delivery and boosts fan engagement with Bitmovin

National Rugby League Unlocking Fan Engagement by Tackling the OTT Workflow The National Rugby League finds a winning team in Dalet and Bitmovin

The National Rugby League (NRL), the premier rugby competition in Australia and New Zealand with millions of fans and roughly 3 million TV match viewers, needed to modernize its OTT strategy to engage fans faster and scale globally. The league faced fragmented content sources, duplicate metadata, a massive back catalog (some content nearly 120 years old), and slow, manual workflows that delayed publishing high‑quality video across its sites, apps and partner platforms.

By integrating Dalet’s Ooyala Flex Media Platform with Bitmovin’s encoding, player and analytics APIs, NRL automated common workflows, enabled parallel encoding (from 1 to 20+ simultaneous jobs), and cut processing-to-publish times by up to half. The result: better visual quality at lower bitrates, faster go‑live of live and near‑live highlights across 30+ sites and apps, expanded global reach and revenue opportunities, higher subscriber growth, and broader audience impact (helping NRL reach ~100M viewers and become #1 Australian sport on Facebook) while reducing costs.

The National Rugby League

Quanah McBride

Head of Digital Media Operations