One of the hottest trends in television has nothing to do with doctor shows or true crime, and everything to do with technology. The industry has spoken: Streaming live events is in.
Live events have long been part of the digital age dating back to 1993 when Severe Tire Damage became the first band to stream on the internet. But streaming live events has been an especially buzzy talking point lately, largely because of the increased demand for sports. Netflix’s Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight resulted in 65 million concurrent streams globally. The Fox-owned Tubi broke a streaming record for the Super Bowl, averaging a 13.6 million per minute average audience. And later this year, YouTube will live stream the NFL’s Week 1 game in Brazil for free — a first for the company.
All three companies prominently highlighted their sports offerings during their 2025 advertiser upfronts presentations this month, with Netflix even closing its presentation with a performance from the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.
But not all of these events have been seamless. The Paul vs. Tyson fight, for one, was riddled with glitches, and when Hulu aired the 2025 Oscars, the livestream cut out unexpectedly.
“If all broadcasts went to streaming tomorrow and we turned off terrestrial and cable… the technology is not efficient enough today that we could really support that,” Brad Altfest, managing director for media and entertainment at real-time engagement firm Agora, told TheWrap.
Welcome to the wild west of livestreaming. As more people continue to ditch cable and broadcast, this television option has become increasingly valuable. Amazon struck an 11-year deal with the NBA reportedly worth $1.8 billion, while Netflix paid $5 billion for a 10-year deal with the WWE. To account for this monumental growth, the streamers spearheading the charge are having to develop and adapt this technology in real time.
“Streaming is just a new delivery system,” Robert Thompson, director for the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, told TheWrap. “Getting this stuff to all these people consuming it at the same time over streaming has technical challenges that are different from the ones that we’ve seen in the previous two iterations [of live TV]. But technology seems to be catching up.”
The issue isn’t figuring out the right bit of code; it’s trying to bend and twist platforms so that they fit within the physical and technological limitations of our current internet. To better understand just how much work takes place before you press play on that basketball game, TheWrap spoke to several experts at some of the biggest players in the television industry.
The basics: How streaming a live event works
Way back in television’s past, viewers had to adjust their set’s rabbit ears — the colloquial term for television antennas — to better pick up the signal from their local station. Oddly enough, TV’s future operates in roughly the same way.
“The way that digital delivery is done online actually mirrors a lot of those same structures,” Agora’s Altfest explained.
Watching a live event is a so-called bi-directional process between streamers and consumers, meaning consumers are telling the platform what they want to watch and, in turn, that platform puts in a request to send the requested stream to the consumer. It’s a complicated enough process when you’re talking about a finished video that can be encoded and stored for access later, like a season of “Squid Game.” But it becomes a much bigger headache when you’re talking about a currently airing event.
On the streamer side, the broadcaster has to film the event using either its own production team or one it’s hired. That footage nearly always includes real-time elements from a design team, which can include everything from a company’s logo to on-the-air graphics that better explain a football play. Sometimes those design elements are added from an offsite studio, meaning the stream has to be encoded before it’s sent to that design facility.
Once the design elements are in place, it’s ready to go out. For some companies like Netflix, the encoded live stream is sent to their own content delivery network (CDN), a group of Netflix-owned servers around the country. So when you press play on a title, you’re putting in a request to watch a title not from Netflix’s base in the Bay Area but from one of these regional CDNs that are closer to your computer. For other companies that don’t have their own servers, they ultiize third-party CDNs. These middlemen work with telecommunications companies to ensure encoded videos are sent to a server that’s close to the consumer who’s trying to watch the latest game. Once the encoded video is sent to a nearby server, it goes to the household that requested to watch the stream and is decoded.
All of this has to happen in seconds. And much like with the rabbit ears of the past, how close your computer physically is to the CDN that’s delivering the feed will determine the quality of your stream.
But the actual streaming process starts with rigorous testing that happens sometimes months before a live event starts. These tests are primarily used to determine if the stream will hold when the platform receives an influx of viewers and what its video quality will look like. It’s through these tests that the team develops the myriad of algorithms designed to optimize performance. If you’ve ever been watching a game and noticed that the picture suddenly looks fuzzier and blockier, that’s the result of one of those algorithms. The platform is having a difficult time connecting to your internet, so instead of cutting the feed altogether, it lowers the frame rate, meaning the video in question is a lighter load for your struggling bandwidth.
The engineering team at Max, which aired around 30,000 live events last year, determines how a live stream may look in more rural areas by throttling their bandwidth within a controlled setting, an insider familiar with the matter told TheWrap. It’s impossible to know exactly how a live stream will appear in any place on any certain day. But by limiting their bandwidth to simulate a poor internet connection, the team can determine whether the stream is acceptable to send out based on Max’s standards.
There’s also one issue broadcast and cable never had to deal with: maintaining distribution. For all its wonder, the internet is a finite thing. Websites can become too overloaded and no longer work if too many people try to access them at the same time. To prevent that from happening, companies have to make educated guesses about how many people will be watching a certain event at the same time. Historical data and testing is often relied upon to figure out this number, which is almost always scaled up.
That was the case with Peacock’s record-breaking NFL wild card playoff game. The game, which took place in January 2024, was responsible for 30% of all U.S. internet traffic the evening that it aired. To prepare for that load, the streamer started stress testing its platform back in May 2023, an insider familiar with the matter told TheWrap.
“We do still spend a lot of time preparing for each event, accounting for a variety of different scenarios to ensure we’re ready for anything,” Patrick Miceli, chief technology officer over global streaming and NBCU Media Group, emphasized in a TechRadar interview.
If all of this sounds like a ton of work, it is. Every live event that’s streamed has its own team of engineers and professionals that are monitoring the stream to make sure nothing cuts out. That’s without accounting for the countless individuals who spend hundreds of hours stress testing platforms well before anything even airs.
A new way of watching and an old mindset around operating
As streaming has evolved, many companies have realized this approach can be more than just meeting consumers where they are. It can allow streamers to evolve the process of watching television altogether.
To prepare for the 2024 Paris Olympics, Peacock figured out how to air up to 60 concurrent livestreams. The streamer also developed a sport navigation menu specifically for the event and introduced a multiview option, allowing viewers to watch up to four events at once. More than a quarter of Olympics viewers on Peacock utilized the multiview functionality. Peacock also had to scale its platform not just to account for the vast amount of Olympics viewers but horizontally to account for other Peacock users who may be watching different content at the same time.
The Paris Olympics impacted Max as well, which streamed the event internationally. Max built a feature in its platform that allowed users to seamlessly switch between events. Now that same feature lets users search for different episodes of a show without having to return to that show’s title page. The streamer’s multiview has also been widely utilized by NASCAR fans.
Then there’s YouTube, which introduced multiview in 2024 and has been testing a live commentary offering for its creators called Watch With. This offering lets creators narrate live events to their audiences as they’re happening. YouTube also allows users to comment, blurring the lines between TV platform and social media.
These are all features that broadcast and cable television were incapable of harnessing. But the pace at which this industry is moving comes at a cost. The assumption that a livestream will “just work” doesn’t really apply. Because this process for streaming is so involved, a single mismatched piece of metadata can cause a major delay. That’s a major reason why certain big brands, like the NFL and NBA, are opting for packages that include both streaming and traditional broadcast. So when, for example, the Hulu stream for the 2025 Oscars shut off, viewers could switch to ABC.
There’s also consumer preference to consider. Audiences quickly accepted streaming when it came to on-demand content, but streaming’s promise of letting people watch whatever they want, whenever they want stands at odds with the timeliness live events require.
“This was always one of the cultural limitations. Live TV seems to be harder [for streaming], not just technologically, but culturally as well,” Thompson said. “But the key step in this is something that, for the most part, has already happened, which was once you could stream on your main TV.”
There’s also a bit of reconfiguring that needs to happen around advertising. While streaming lets advertisers target more specific consumers, it also requires more analytic work.
“We all have this plug-and-play mentality about things, especially when you’re coming from a mature technology ecosystem, which is how I would describe the traditional broadcast industry,” Agora’s Altfest said. “Getting the data is easy, but you really need a team of your own dedicated data analysts to be able to go through that now.”
“There was something so charmingly simple about the broadcast notion that everybody watched the same things at the same time, and you could gather these enormous audiences,” Syracuse University’s Thompson said. “I don’t see, in the long run, that model continuing. What we’re seeing now is that transition period where they’re figuring out these business models.”
The beginning of a grand TV experiment
TV’s interest in live streaming is growing at a rapid pace.
Netflix currently airs new episodes of WWE Raw every Monday with another fight from Most Valuable Productions in the works and two more NFL games planned for Christmas Day. That third Christmas Day NFL game will air on Prime Video, which has long held the exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football and secured a highly coveted package with the NBA and WNBA last year. As for Peacock, the NBCUniversal-owned streamer is gearing up for the challenge of its lifetime as it will stream both the Milan Cortina Olympics and Super Bowl LX next February. And on Max, the streamer is currently airing the NBA playoffs with the Roland Garro, formerly known as The French Open, scheduled to take place in May.
“In a way, these are experiments because we haven’t really been doing mass live events at this level of scale online to date,” Altfest said. “It’s fair to say that this is the beginning. It’s never going to be less than this moving forward.”
For his part, Thompson believes that streaming will ultimately completely disrupt the live events landscape. While broadcast and cable may still exist, he believes “everything is moving towards streaming delivery.”
“It’s almost more like the movement from the silent and black-and-white movies to sound and color,” Thomson explained. “It’s not as though people don’t make black-and-white movies every now and again. But the sound movie took over from the silent movie, experimental stuff notwithstanding.”
