Case Study: Seven West Media on managing huge growth in Winter Olympics streams

The 2022 Winter Olympics delivered record-breaking online numbers and a huge 250 per cent increase in streaming. 

Digital Nation Australia spoke to leaders in digital and technology at Seven West Media about the business’ relationship with its primary content delivery network (CDN) and security partner Akamai, as well as with AWS as a strategic cloud partner.

According to Gereurd Roberts, chief digital officer at Seven West Media, the recent Beijing Winter Olympics saw a streaming lift of 250 percent compared to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, with up to 20 streaming channels, delivering a total of 376 million minutes.

“We went past that previous Winter Olympics number by the way, after just four days. So you can see the increase in capacity, the increasing delivery demands that we've seen as we work through these big events,” said Roberts.

Seven West Media has been working with Akamai since its video-on-demand and streaming service 7plus launched, he said.

“They've helped us become again, Australia's number one, commercial free-to-air BVOD service.’’

Scott Favelle, technology director at Seven West Media told Digital Nation Australia that Akamai assists in accelerating the content delivery from AWS to customers’ homes, reducing the likelihood of buffering.

“We actually send down a number of different versions of the same content. So we’ll have the top one being in HD looking very crisp, but that'll go all the way down to sub-standard definition. And so one of the things that Akamai does is it minimises the chances that our customers are going to be watching substandard video,” said Favelle.

“You might be watching 7plus via Telstra BigPond, somebody else might be watching it via TPG. So because Akamai has their digital infrastructure in each of those ISPs, and their own data links of how they get their content there, it means that we offer the best quality service we could provide for our customers.”

Seven West Media also leverages Akamai for load testing in order to stress-test the streams to account for between half a million and a million users.

“We looked at a number of other load test solutions as well. But none had the same ability to properly test the video streams themselves, and they hadn't handled live scale events of the size that we were expecting,” said Roberts.

Akamai was also able to run this as a managed service said Favelle, so the business didn’t need to allocate headcount to load testing.

According to Favelle, AWS was leveraged for hosting the company’s CMS, APIs, data pipelines and video encoding.

“The production for the Tokyo Olympics was on premise, and so we had to get the video that was created in Melbourne up into what was AWS would then go into Akamai.

“[AWS] have a lot of deep video expertise so they were a natural partner for us,” said Favelle.