Case Study: Eurosport achieves seamless, scalable live OTT streaming and 50% backend offload with Varnish Software's Streaming Server

Eurosport Used Varnish Streaming Server To Power Seamless Live And Ott Video Streaming And Manage Massive Amounts Of Data

Eurosport, the European sports network owned by Discovery, expanded aggressively into online and OTT streaming and confronted the scalability challenges that come with live video: typical traffic of ~20,000 requests/sec, spikes to ~50,000 during major events, and several terabytes of data per server. They needed to protect backend origins from overload, bring streaming logic back in-house from a CDN provider, and build a resilient, cost-effective platform that could evolve quickly.

Eurosport deployed Varnish Streaming Server (with Varnish High Availability, Massive Storage Engine and Custom Statistics) across three servers, a setup implemented in about a week with Varnish support. The Varnish layer now offloads more than 50% of live-streaming requests, enables DASH/HTML5 playback, higher bitrates and multiscreen features, reduces origin costs and failure risk, and delivers smoother, more flexible streaming during peak demand.

Eurosport

Benjamin Baumann

Solutions Architect