Case Study: RTL Nederland achieves scalable, cost-effective streaming to reach more viewers with Microsoft Azure CDN

Bursting to the cloud to reach more viewers

RTL Nederland, a leading Dutch television broadcaster, faced a rapid shift from linear TV to on-demand and live online viewing and needed a cost‑effective, scalable way to absorb large, intermittent traffic bursts and accelerate feature delivery. To meet this challenge, RTL turned to Microsoft Azure CDN and complementary Azure services—including Azure Media Services, Blob Storage, and ExpressRoute—to offload infrastructure, enable agile deployments, and support viewers across devices.

By implementing a hybrid CDN anchored by Microsoft Azure CDN and Azure Media Services for secure encoding, dynamic packaging, and live streaming, RTL scaled media resources on demand, added regional redundancy (Amsterdam and Dublin), and removed the need to build and maintain costly on‑premises hardware. The Azure solution saved RTL nearly €50,000 in build costs, reduced ongoing maintenance and work hours, supported large concurrent audiences (including ~100,000 VoD viewers and significant live-event spikes), and accelerated time to market for new video features.

RTL Nederland

Fardau van Neerden

Senior System Engineer