Case Study: Globo.com achieves 25x performance and streams to 500,000+ viewers with NGINX

Globo.com Delivers Live Video Streaming to 500,000+ Viewers with NGINX

Globo.com, the digital arm of Grupo Globo and the largest online video service in Latin America, needed to deliver live coverage of major sporting events and other programming to hundreds of thousands of viewers across PCs, iOS, Android and smart TVs. Their legacy RTMP-based media-server stack limited mobile support, effective caching and load balancing, and made end-to-end monitoring and scaling difficult—resulting in buffering and capacity problems during peak live events.

Globo.com migrated to an HTTP-based delivery architecture built around NGINX, adding iOS support, HTTP load balancing and caching, observability, and features like HLS/HDS and a DVR-style playback backed by Redis, plus authentication/queuing for peak events. The new platform delivered roughly 25× performance over the previous infrastructure, served 500,000+ concurrent viewers reliably, cut buffering about sixfold, improved availability and horizontal scalability, and reduced origin load and operational complexity.

Globo

Leandro Moreira

Software Engineer