New Relic Helps SBS Deliver Record-Breaking FIFA World Cup Coverage with Intelligent Observability
New Relic, a leading provider of intelligent observability solutions, has announced that its end-to-end infrastructure monitoring platform played a key role in helping Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) deliver its most digitally significant FIFA World Cup™ coverage to date. By providing real-time visibility into critical digital services and infrastructure, New Relic helped SBS manage unprecedented streaming demand and deliver a reliable viewing experience to millions of Australians.
During the tournament, SBS reached approximately 64% of Australia’s population, equivalent to 18 million people, across broadcast and digital platforms. Despite record-breaking audience engagement and increased streaming activity, the broadcaster completed its coverage without major technical issues.
The achievement highlights the growing importance of intelligent observability in supporting large-scale live events, where uninterrupted digital services are essential to maintaining audience engagement and delivering seamless viewing experiences.
The announcement also comes as SBS confirmed that it has secured exclusive Australian broadcast, video, and radio rights to the FIFA World Cup 2030™. The agreement extends SBS’s longstanding relationship with FIFA, which began in 1986, and reinforces the broadcaster’s commitment to bringing major international sporting events to Australian audiences.
Managing Record-Breaking Streaming Demand
The FIFA World Cup presented SBS with its most demanding digital delivery challenge to date. The tournament featured more matches, more streaming activity, and more simultaneous viewers than previous editions, placing significant pressure on the broadcaster’s technology infrastructure.
SBS Technical and Strategic Operations Manager Rob Hussey explained that the World Cup represents the organisation’s biggest test of digital infrastructure every four years. The latest tournament required the team to support substantially higher demand while maintaining the performance and reliability expected by viewers.
SBS delivered 146 million streams throughout the competition, representing a 155% increase compared with the 2022 tournament. Streaming activity peaked at 1.5 million concurrent viewers during the final match, demonstrating the scale of demand its digital platforms needed to accommodate.
The broadcaster supported 104 live matches, 40 more than in 2022. This increase placed sustained pressure on the systems responsible for delivering live content, managing streaming traffic, and maintaining service availability.
To meet these demands, SBS relied on New Relic’s intelligent observability platform to monitor its infrastructure and digital services in real time. The platform enabled engineering teams to assess system performance, identify potential bottlenecks, and maintain visibility across the different components involved in content delivery.
According to Hussey, New Relic provided a unified view of 15 service components and more than 90 performance metrics. This consolidated visibility allowed engineers to understand how individual elements of the streaming pipeline were performing without having to combine information from multiple disconnected monitoring systems.
The improved oversight helped SBS maintain reliable services throughout the tournament and contributed to the successful delivery of its extensive World Cup coverage without major technical disruptions.
Unified Monitoring for Complex Digital Infrastructure
Delivering live sporting events at scale requires more than simply increasing server capacity. Streaming platforms must respond quickly to sudden changes in audience behaviour, particularly in the moments leading up to kick-off and during important match events.
SBS operates a hybrid technology environment that combines internally developed systems with third-party services. Every component must work together effectively to deliver content to viewers, making end-to-end visibility particularly important during periods of extreme demand.
Because the infrastructure had changed significantly since the previous World Cup, SBS could not rely entirely on configurations and processes used for earlier tournaments. Instead, the engineering team prioritised preparation, performance testing, and continuous monitoring.
Ahead of the competition, SBS developed a new unified dashboard within New Relic. This dashboard became the primary monitoring interface for assessing system health across matches, replacing a more fragmented approach to tracking critical services.
By consolidating operational data into one view, the platform helped engineers monitor the performance of connected systems and understand how changes in one component could affect the wider delivery pipeline.
This approach also improved troubleshooting efficiency. When a performance issue emerged, engineers could examine the relevant component and investigate the underlying cause more quickly, rather than manually reviewing the entire system.
The ability to monitor infrastructure continuously was particularly valuable during live matches, when rapid diagnosis and resolution are essential to preventing technical problems from affecting viewers.
Forecasting Audience Surges and Optimising Infrastructure
Preparing for a global sporting event requires accurate demand forecasting and careful infrastructure planning. Underestimating audience numbers can lead to performance problems, while excessive provisioning can increase operating costs unnecessarily.
To address this challenge, SBS’s data analysts forecast audience growth and identified matches likely to generate the highest streaming demand. These projections helped the organisation determine how much infrastructure capacity would be needed to accommodate expected peaks while maintaining sufficient operational headroom.
SBS also conducted load testing using projected audience volumes to validate its forecasts before the tournament began. New Relic was used during these tests to monitor throughput, latency, and performance across the technology stack.
The testing process helped the engineering team identify areas requiring improvement before audiences placed the systems under real-world pressure. With visibility into individual components, engineers could investigate performance concerns and make targeted adjustments.
This combination of forecasting, load testing, and real-time observability enabled SBS to prepare for significant traffic surges without unnecessarily overprovisioning its infrastructure.
New Relic Senior Vice President and General Manager for Asia-Pacific and Japan, Rob Newell, said the broadcaster’s success demonstrated the importance of treating observability as a core part of digital infrastructure. He noted that the platform supported SBS’s engineering team by providing the visibility required to plan for peak demand and address emerging issues before they became noticeable to audiences.
The collaboration illustrates how observability technologies can help media organisations improve operational readiness, strengthen service reliability, and support increasingly demanding digital experiences.
About New Relic
New Relic provides intelligent observability solutions designed to help businesses operate confidently in an increasingly AI-driven technology environment. Its Intelligent Observability Platform brings telemetry data and business outcomes together, helping organisations monitor complex digital environments and make informed operational decisions.
The platform combines AI-powered capabilities, automation, and performance monitoring to help engineering teams move beyond reactive troubleshooting towards more proactive and coordinated operations. It also supports efforts to optimise technology spending, protect revenue, and maintain reliable digital services.
Organisations across multiple industries use New Relic to improve application performance, support innovation, and deliver better customer experiences. Its customers include Adidas Runtastic, Domino’s, Ryanair, Swiggy, Topgolf, and William Hill.
For more information, visit www.newrelic.com.
About Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)
Special Broadcasting Service is an Australian public media organisation committed to helping Australians explore, respect, and celebrate cultural diversity. Established in 1975, SBS plays an important role in supporting an inclusive and cohesive society through multilingual and multicultural programming.
The organisation operates a multiplatform media network that includes five free-to-air television channels: SBS, National Indigenous Television (NITV), SBS2, SBS Food, and SBS World Movies.
SBS also provides audio programming and services to more than 60 culturally and linguistically diverse communities in their own languages. Its digital portfolio includes SBS On Demand, a streaming service offering television programs, films, and live channels to audiences across Australia.
Through its broadcast and digital platforms, SBS continues to expand access to news, entertainment, cultural programming, and major international sporting events.
The successful delivery of the FIFA World Cup demonstrates how the combination of infrastructure planning, performance monitoring, and intelligent observability can help broadcasters meet growing audience expectations. As SBS prepares for future tournaments, including the FIFA World Cup 2030™, reliable digital infrastructure will remain central to delivering high-quality coverage to millions of viewer
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