Case Study: NBC Sports Group breaks streaming records with Microsoft Azure

NBC Olympics breaks streaming records with support from Microsoft Azure

NBC Sports Group, a major division of NBCUniversal, faced the monumental challenge of delivering the massive scale of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games to a global digital audience. The event required streaming over 4,500 hours of content to billions of viewers across myriad devices, all without any technical failures. To meet this unprecedented demand for a live, high-definition, and glitch-free experience, NBC Sports turned to its longtime technology partner, Microsoft, and leveraged the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

Microsoft implemented a comprehensive cloud solution using Azure Media Services, Azure Virtual Machines, and Azure Content Delivery Network. This provided the dynamic scalability, redundancy, and innovative features like Dynamic Packaging needed to reformat streams for any device on the fly. The results were record-shattering: Microsoft Azure helped NBC Sports deliver 3.3 billion total streaming minutes with 100% uptime over the 17-day event, more than doubling the live-streamed minutes of all prior Olympics combined and extending their reach to more people on more devices than ever before.

NBC Sports Group

Eric Black

Chief Technology Officer, Digital Media