Case Study: Com Hem achieves seamless, scalable OTT live & VoD streaming with Varnish Software

Swedish ISP Com Hem Used Varnish To Power Seamless Ott Live And Vod Video Streaming, Manage Growing Amounts Of Data And To Build Their Own CDN

Com Hem, a leading Swedish ISP serving about 1.45 million customers with broadband, TV and on‑the‑go streaming, needed a flexible, cost‑predictable way to deliver seamless OTT live and VoD video. Faced with rapidly growing and unpredictable traffic (including large spikes during live events) and unwilling to be locked into inflexible “black box” streaming products, Com Hem set out to build a DIY CDN to protect origin servers, control caching logic and keep costs under control.

They implemented Varnish Cache and related components (VCL, Varnish High Availability, Massive Storage Engine and Hitch/TLS) to run a self‑managed video CDN. The rollout was fast, supported by Varnish engineers, and passed its first big test when it was launched before a major sports event and performed flawlessly. The result is a simpler, scalable platform that saved bandwidth and cache capacity, reduced backend load (around 25% served from origin), handled traffic growth (from ~5 GB/day to peaks of ~60 GB) and delivered predictable pricing and future extensibility.

Com Hem

Adam Palmblad

TV Architect