How 100M+ stream the Super Bowl (Hint: it's smart System Design)

I always enjoy hosting for a big game (mostly cricket in my case, but I've gotten into American football more and more every year :). But no matter the sport, nothing kills the vibe of a watch party like a buffering stream.

Imagine that scenario during the Super Bowl, with over 100 million people watching worldwide. The stakes are sky-high—not just for the players on the field but also for the engineers behind the scenes, laboring to ensure a flawless live streaming experience.

This interesting convergence of sports and technology illustrates that the Super Bowl is both a test of athletic prowess and a display of technological brilliance. Today I want to break down the ingenious System Design strategies that enable millions around the world to tune in reliably.

Super Bowl LIX#

On February 9, 2025, the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans hosted the 59th edition of this iconic cultural event. The Kansas City Chiefs battled the Philadelphia Eagles for the Championship title (Philly ended up winning 40-24, much to the joy of many fans who had grown tired of KC's reign of dominance).

More than just a game, the Super Bowl is a global spectacle that brings millions together to celebrate sports and culture. Without the ability to watch remotely, this event would lose its global hype. And as the CEO of video streaming technology company Phenix recently noted, it would also make so much of the modern sports viewing experience impossible.

That’s where the massive technical challenge lies: live streaming the Super Bowl seamlessly and at massive scale across varied geographies, networks, and devices. Streaming the event requires a System Design capable of handling traffic surges, maintaining minimum latency, and ensuring continuous service—an engineering feat as thrilling as the game itself.

To grasp the impact of overcoming these challenges, we can examine past events where streaming issues pushed technology to its limits. By applying insights from these experiences, we can better understand how to ensure seamless streaming events.

What Do Past Events Teach Us?#

Massive live streaming events like the Super Bowl demand a resilient System Design, yet history shows that even leading platforms have encountered challenges they anticipated but weren’t fully prepared for. Analyzing past incidents can uncover key lessons to improve streaming reliability for future events. Let’s do a quick overview of some of the events that experienced difficulties during their live streams:

• Super Bowl LI: During the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LI, viewers using Fox Sports’s online streaming service experienced a significant outage, causing many to miss crucial game moments. While the exact cause wasn’t publicly disclosed, it underscored the importance of resilient infrastructure and failover mechanisms in live streaming events.

• Super Bowl LVIII: Super Bowl LVIII faced widespread streaming issues across multiple providers. Many fans reported buffering, freezing, and momentary blackouts, especially during high-traffic moments like kickoff, half-time, and game-deciding plays. These incidents highlighted the challenge of managing sudden traffic surges while maintaining service reliability.

• Paul vs. Tyson boxing event: Netflix’s live-streamed boxing event featuring Jake Paul and Mike Tyson drew millions of viewers, but the platform struggled to keep up with the demand. The unexpected volume of concurrent users overwhelmed its infrastructure, leading to an outage that left many viewers unable to access the stream in real time.

While past events have provided valuable lessons, they also highlighted the complex nature of streaming systems. With this in mind, let’s look at the challenges typically faced during a live stream event.

Streaming System Challenges#

The Super Bowl is a huge test for modern technology. Ensuring smooth live streaming with over 100 million viewers is no easy task. The challenge becomes even more significant with viewers across different regions, devices, and network conditions. Streaming providers must prioritize key factors such as availability, concurrency, low latency, and reliability—each essential for delivering a seamless experience to fans worldwide.

• Availability: To maintain uninterrupted streaming during the Super Bowl, platforms rely on multi-region setups, backup data centers, and failover systems. This approach ensures that the service continues to run smoothly, even if part of the system encounters an issue.

• Concurrency: The Super Bowl stream has one massive traffic surge concentrated within a few hours. If a platform can’t handle this peak, it simply can’t serve the event. The advantage is that we know precisely when this demand will occur, allowing us to allocate all resources accordingly. However, the real challenge lies in predicting the highest possible number of concurrent viewers. While past data and estimates provide guidance, the peak remains uncertain, emphasizing the need to design for the worst-case scenario without over-provisioning.

• Low-latency: Delays of even a few seconds can spoil the excitement of watching a live event like the Super Bowl. Fans don’t want to hear about a touchdown on social media before they see it on their screens. Keeping latency to an absolute minimum ensures viewers can enjoy the game in real time.

• Reliability: Viewers shouldn’t have to worry about buffering, glitches, or sudden outages—they should be able to focus entirely on the game. A reliable streaming system ensures that every pass, touchdown, and replay is delivered seamlessly. This requires proactive monitoring, rapid failover mechanisms, and a resilient infrastructure that can withstand unexpected failures without disrupting the experience.

We can conclude that live streaming events come with several key challenges:

• A need for a robust infrastructure to support live events.

• Managing traffic surges while maintaining service reliability.

• Designing scalable systems to handle unpredictable spikes in user traffic.

Let’s now explore the workflow of a live broadcasting system.

System Workflow#

To understand how live sports streaming functions, let’s break down the process that ensures millions of fans experience a smooth and uninterrupted broadcast.

• Capture and digitalize the video feed: Cameras at the venue capture live action and transmit the raw video feed to an encoder—a specialized hardware or software device that converts analog or uncompressed digital signals into a digital format. This device transforms the visuals into binary data (1s and 0s) for efficient processing and distribution.

• Optimize and prepare the video stream: To optimize the video for streaming, the system compresses the raw video data to remove redundant visual information. The data is then encoded into widely supported digital formats (e.g., H.264 or H.265), ensuring compatibility across different devices. This step reduces file sizes while maintaining visual quality. During this stage, the video is split into smaller segments(typically 2-10 seconds each), along with metadata—such as time stamps, sequence numbers, and resolution options—added to facilitate synchronization and seamless playback.

• Transcode and enhance the video: Once ingested, the video moves to the processing layer, which undergoes transcoding. This process converts the video into multiple resolutions and bitrates, allowing adaptive streaming based on a viewer’s internet speed. Additional overlays—such as scoreboards or subtitles—are incorporated before the video is encrypted to prevent unauthorized access.

• Distribute the stream to viewers: After processing, the video is stored in origin servers, acting as a central repository. A content delivery network (CDN) distributes the content to edge servers closer to viewers to guarantee efficient delivery. These edge servers pull the required data from the CDN, reducing latency and ensuring a smooth viewing experience, even during peak demand.

Below is the high-level design of the live broadcast system:

The high-level design lays the foundation for handling the challenges of live sports streaming. Next, we will explore the essential components of building an efficient broadcasting system.

Game-Changing Approaches for Live Sports Streaming Systems#

To handle millions of streaming requests seamlessly, an efficient system requires:

1. Multi-CDN strategy#

In a multi-CDN strategy, the system uses several CDNs to distribute traffic across edge servers, providing redundancy, load balancing, and resilience. This strategy can help address the challenges posed by large-scale applications, like the Super Bowl’s live streaming, by preventing any single CDN from becoming overwhelmed and reducing the risk of server crashes. If one CDN experiences downtime issues, others can take over the load, ensuring continuous and reliable service.

Super Bowl LIII (2019): The CBS sports app made history by providing free streaming of the Super Bowl. Thanks to its multi-CDN infrastructure, the app managed peak loads, offering a smooth experience even during high-traffic moments like halftime.

When managing costs for high-traffic events like the Super Bowl, one key decision is whether to use a private CDN or rely on a public one.

• Private CDN: Using this category of CDN, the streaming service will enjoy more control over the network, a higher degree of customization, and potentially improved security. However, it has high up-front costs, maintenance, and scaling challenges during traffic spikes.

• Public CDN: It is scalable on demand, has lower up-front costs, and uses a network optimized for high traffic. However, the streaming service will have lesser control over the network and there are potential concerns over data privacy.

2. Auto-scaling infrastructure#

Auto-scaling infrastructure is a feature that allows the system to automatically adjust the number of resources—such as servers and containers—based on real-time demand. This dynamic scaling ensures that the system remains cost-efficient and reliable. When traffic subsides, the system scales down to reduce unnecessary costs. Using this approach, the live sports streaming system can avoid server crashes and maintain a seamless viewing experience.

An important part of this infrastructure is containerization, which enables efficient resource scaling management. With containerization, applications, and their dependencies are packaged into isolated containers. Cloud-based container orchestration services automate these containers’ deployment, scaling, and management. They dynamically arrange containers to optimize the scaling of different microservices, such as streaming, authentication, and analytics. This separation ensures that resources are allocated efficiently, enabling improved system performance and stability during peak demand.

3. Load balancing#

Load balancing distributes user traffic evenly across servers to avoid overloading any single server. Global load balancers use advanced algorithms, such as latency-based and geo-based routing, to maintain smooth operations. Additionally, the load balancer can route traffic based on factors like region or device type, optimizing performance and providing a more tailored experience for the viewers.

4. ISP caching #

To reduce latency and improve load times, caching servers can be placed within the internet service provider’s (ISP) network to deliver content closer to users. When a user requests the content, it is delivered directly from the ISP’s cache instead of returning to the origin server. This approach reduces the latency, improves load times, and lowers bandwidth costs for the ISP and the content provider.

Live sports streaming systems can also integrate CDNs with ISP caching to enhance delivery speed and reduce latency. These CDN edge servers act as caching nodes, storing and delivering content to users faster. This setup combines the benefits of a CDN’s global reach with the ISP’s local proximity to users, offering improved performance, reduced costs, and higher scalability.

5. Streaming protocols#

Using the right streaming protocols is key for sports streaming, where low delay is critical. Protocols like LHLS (Low-latency HLS) or low-latency MPEG-DASH are designed to minimize the delay between live events and the stream. Adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming adjusts the stream quality based on each viewer’s internet speed, delivering the best quality while reducing buffering and minimizing bandwidth usage.

6. Disaster recovery system#

A disaster recovery system is crucial for preparing the streaming system for unexpected failures, such as server crashes or network disruptions. This system ensures rapid recovery and uninterrupted streaming by incorporating strategies such as backup systems, failover mechanisms, and rerouting to healthy servers.

To ensure continuous and uninterrupted streaming, live sports streaming systems must be equipped with disaster recovery strategies that address potential failures. Below are the various disaster recovery techniques:

Using these strategies, live sports streaming platforms can enhance their resilience, minimize downtime, and deliver a seamless experience despite unexpected failures during events like the Super Bowl.

Preparation doesn’t stop here—testing before game day is critical. Now, let’s see how to test the system before the actual game day.

Testing Before the Game Day#

To deliver a flawless streaming experience on game day, rigorous pre-event testing is essential. This helps identify weaknesses, validate scalability, and prepare the system to handle unexpected challenges. Below are the two key methods for effective testing:

• Load testing: Generate a load that mimics millions of concurrent viewers to simulate real-world traffic scenarios. This helps assess the system’s ability to scale under peak demand, ensuring it remains stable and responsive during the event.

• Chaos engineering: Introduce controlled failures, such as disabling servers or simulating network interruptions, to test the system’s resilience under stress. This approach ensures that the platform can continue to deliver service without disrupting the user experience, even when unexpected issues occur.

Through these testing strategies, streaming services can confidently tackle game-day challenges, minimize disruptions, provide high-quality playback, and ensure a reliable experience for viewers, even under peak traffic conditions.

The Road Ahead#

As the clock ticks down to game day, one can’t help but wonder: Will the streaming platform meet the immense demands of this iconic event?

Consider these questions:

• Is the platform designed to scale seamlessly during traffic surges?

• Can it quickly recover from a CDN failure or other unexpected disruptions?

• Are the best streaming protocols guarantee smooth playback across devices, even in less-than-ideal conditions?

These aren’t just questions for the Super Bowl—they’re the cornerstone of building resilient, scalable systems for any high-pressure scenario. Events like the Super Bowl will continue to grow, drawing even more online viewers as technology becomes an even bigger part of entertainment and daily life. As technology evolves, System Designers must develop innovative solutions to deliver services at scale with exceptional quality. This article only scratches the surface of building systems that can withstand time.

If you want to deepen your understanding of these concepts and enhance your ability to tackle large-scale challenges, consider Grokking the Modern System Design Interview. This course offers valuable insights into system design principles, helping you build the skills to engineer resilient, scalable platforms.

Happy learning!