SPORT · LIVE AND HIGHLIGHTS

CDN for Live Sport Streaming

Live matches, highlights and the ad breaks around them, delivered from the edge closest to each viewer. Standard HLS leaves an audience 20 to 40 seconds behind the action; our LL-HLS pipeline brings that down to the 2-4 second range.

From $5/TB down to $2.50/TB, one rate across regions · 14-day testing period on real traffic · $25 monthly minimum waived · Engineer reply within 3 business hours

2-4 s

To the live edge on LL-HLS

96%+

Average cache hit ratio

3 regions

One rate in Europe, Asia and America

A Goal Doubles the Audience Before Anyone Reacts

20 to 40 s

Standard HLS

Six to ten second segments and a deep playlist. Your viewer learns the score from a phone notification before the ball crosses the line on screen.

2 to 4 s

BlazingCDN LL-HLS

Partial segments leave the edge as each part is written, blocking playlists are held open, and preload hints fetch the next part before the player asks.

Match-day playback, straight from the edge

A boxing clip packaged as HLS, four renditions from 360p to 1080p, served by an Anycast pull zone. Switch the quality mid-play and watch the segments arrive: this is what your viewers get on match day.

HLS · Anycast pull zone

Boxing match clip streamed as HLS through BlazingCDN

AutoQuality·Bitrate·Last segmentServed from

Four renditions, one manifest

360p to 1080p in one HLS ladder. The player opens at 1080p; switch to another fixed quality, or to Auto, from the settings icon.

Cached once per region

The first viewer pulls a segment from Cloud Storage; every next viewer in that region gets it from the edge, and your origin stays idle.

Try it in your own player

Copy the manifest URL below into VLC, Safari or any HLS player. Same files, same CDN, no sign-up.

Manifest: https://cdn84906683.blazingcdn.net/boxing/hls/master.m3u8 · Segments: 4 s · Footage: Pixabay, free licence

What a Live Match Does to Delivery

A live stream cannot be pre-cached the way a video library can. Demand arrives in waves: at kick-off, at the restart, and in seconds-long surges when something actually happens. A goal can double or triple concurrent viewers before any infrastructure has time to react. The number that decides the night is not average load, it is peak load.

Size for the peak

Peak concurrency, not average concurrency, is what your capacity has to survive.

The peak is where the money is

The ad break at the peak carries the highest CPM of the whole broadcast.

Same match everywhere

A viewer in Asia should not get a worse match than a viewer in Germany.

CASE STUDY

Live sports streaming, written up in full

Concurrency tripled at kickoff and every buffering second cost an ad break. The write-up covers what the edge did with the surge, what happened to ad delivery through the monetised moments, and which numbers moved afterwards. Everything on this page is the mechanism; this is the same mechanism with a scoreboard attached.

Read the case →

One Match, One Traffic Curve

Concurrent viewers across ninety minutes. Infrastructure sized for the average fails on the third line.

Pre-match build-up

Kick-off

Goal, 63rd minute

Half-time ad break

Full-time

Ads Are a First-Class Workload

The inventory around the peak carries the highest CPM of the broadcast. Delivering the stream and losing the ad is not a partial success.

VAST resolved at the edge

The ad response is returned from the nearest edge instead of travelling back to your ad server, so it lands inside the timeout budget even at peak concurrency. A failed VAST resolution is no ad, no impression and no revenue.

Creatives warmed before the window

High-rotation creatives booked for the peak windows are pre-positioned at the regional edges ahead of the broadcast, so the pre-roll competing for the highest CPM slot is served from warm cache instead of a cold fetch.

Stream and ads never compete

Live segments and ad creatives are given separate delivery priority, so a surge in concurrent viewers does not quietly degrade ad delivery. Both workloads run on their own path through the burst.

What Happens at the Peak

Four things that hit every live sports broadcast. Here is what the delivery layer does in each one.

A goal doubles the audience in seconds

The surge is absorbed across edge nodes in the US, Europe and Asia at the same time, so no single node is the bottleneck. Your origin only ever sees cache-miss traffic, which for a live stream is bounded by the segment cadence, not by the number of viewers.

Kick-off lands on a cold cache

For a scheduled event we pre-position manifests, opening segments and high-rotation ad creatives at the regional edges before the broadcast window, so the first wave hits a warm edge instead of your origin.

The audience is behind the live edge

Low-Latency HLS: partial segments go out as each part is written, blocking playlist requests are held open at the edge, parts are cached individually, and preload hints let us fetch the next part before the player asks for it.

Quality drops exactly when it matters

Segment delivery latency stays the same at peak as at steady state, so the ABR player never reads congestion and downgrades quality during the biggest moment of the match.

What a season of live traffic costs

Progressive tiers work like tax brackets: each rate applies only to the traffic inside its range. Requests, HTTPS, custom domains and origin shield are included, and a match delivered in Asia costs the same as one delivered in Germany.

TIER 01

First 5 TB

$5.00 per TB

TIER 02

5 to 25 TB

$4.50 per TB

TIER 03

25 to 100 TB

$4.00 per TB

100 TB a month works out at $415

Each tier is billed only on the traffic inside it, so the tiers add up rather than replace each other. 25 TB is about $115, 500 TB is about $1,815, and above 500 TB a month we quote it for you.

You Bring the Stream. We Deliver It.

BlazingCDN is a delivery layer, not a processing layer. Your media server, encoder and packager produce the HLS or DASH output; we take the packaged segments and manifests and serve them from the edge. We do not transcode, re-package or generate manifests, and that is exactly why nothing we do can break your broadcast pipeline.