TV 2 Norway scales to support 20,000 live sports streams with AWS

Live sports production and delivery have changed tremendously in the past decade, backed by cloud and streaming advancements making it more accessible to a broader range of organizations. TV 2 Norway has helped pioneer this incredible transformation, building a video platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that can support the live streaming of more than 20,000 sporting events each year, including 1,000 simultaneous live broadcasts.

Reaching nearly every household in the Nordic region, as well as audiences across Europe, TV 2 Norway delivers content through traditional linear channels and the TV 2 Play app, powered almost entirely by the AWS Cloud. When the company set its sights on streaming more live sports programming to viewers a few years ago, it knew that an on-premises video pipeline just wouldn’t cut it anymore. TV 2 Norway needed the ability to support significantly more streams, from professional level leagues to youth matches, across football, handball, ice hockey, basketball, volleyball, and more. It required a new level of automation and scalability, which it found using AWS Media Services.

“After doing some research, I realized that AWS was the best option to build our new video platform with the cloud. AWS has the best stability and availability, and we could easily automate AWS Media Services with clear APIs,” shared Rune Jordal, Video Architect and Team Lead at TV 2 Norway. “Being able to support 20,000 live event streams in a single year was always the goal, which made AWS the obvious choice. Based on our current trajectory we’ll hit that next year.”

Automating scalability

In its multi-year journey to expand its live sports catalogue, TV 2 Norway first focused on developing a video solution that could economically support high volume, niche audience content. They also needed an approach that could be easily replicated and required little or no staffing. Jordal and his team built and tested a proof-of-concept in late 2020 using AWS Media Services and AI cameras installed by a third-party vendor in various locations across the region. The technical setup was designed to be fully automated, from camera to end-user, including the spinning up of AWS resources only as needed. After an extensive testing phase, they put the new solution into production, began building features on top of it, and continued to scale.

Today, the video platform comprises AWS Elemental MediaLive for live adaptive bitrate (ABR) encoding. It compresses the incoming camera signal and encodes it to support playback on as many devices as possible and with varying network quality. Then, AWS Elemental MediaPackage segments and prepares the video for the content delivery network (CDN) to serve to viewers. Presently, TV 2 Norway uses Amazon CloudFront for caching before the CDN delivery, as well as a CDN failsafe. AWS Lambda provisions resources for live channels on an as-needed basis using a CRON expression that runs at regular intervals to check when matches are scheduled to begin. Content is automatically recorded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), where it is made available to distribution partners or moved to deep storage.

Benchmarking success

Just four years ago, TV 2 Norway streamed more than 2,500 sporting events on its TV 2 Play app, and has steadily increased the volume every year. In 2025, Jordal expects the platform to surpass 16,000 live streams and hit 20,000 in 2026. To make this goal a reality, both TV 2 Norway and the AWS Media Services team quickly realized that scaling the platform for their needs would mean rethinking the way they build media workflows in the cloud.

“AWS Media Services are meant to protect customers so they aren’t impacted by another organizations high traffic, and they’re also geared toward traditional broadcast workflows. It took us some time to figure out how to architect our solution to scale in the way we needed to accommodate all these live streams,” Jordal recalled. “Direct communication with the AWS service team helped make the process much more straightforward. They understand our challenges and are on the ball helping to envision new ways of working.”

Based on the initial success of its lower-tier live sports streams, TV 2 Norway felt confident moving its premium events to the AWS-powered workflow and has migrated some aspects of its linear channels to AWS as well. The company continues to leverage physical infrastructure for receiving and encoding signals in some cases but often pushes content back to the cloud in a hybrid approach.

“I’d estimate as much as 90% of our streaming and broadcast workloads are now on AWS,” noted Jordal. “It’s easier to automate and simplify workflows in the cloud, and that frees up hands to focus on other aspects of the business, instead of routing signals. We’re able to accelerate our speed of development using Lamda and Step Functions for orchestration.”

Modernizing linear workflows

With the scalability of the TV 2 Norway video platform firmly established, Jordal is setting his sights on other ways the cloud can benefit the company. Top on his list, bridging the linear and over-the-top (OTT) worlds and incorporating more automation in traditional processes.

“Linear channels follow a separate path from what we’ve been doing with the cloud. Joining OTT and linear would be a very big challenge, but a fun one at that,” Jordal mused.

He continued, “One of the most important things AWS brings to us is the ability to quickly prototype. It’s extremely easy to build new features and test them out to see if they’re a good idea or not. The combo of AWS and generative AI is very useful.”

For example, using generative AI to develop base code, the TV 2 Norway team was able to build a UI that manages how URLs are delivered to end users and redirect traffic if needed. They built and tested the feature in one day, then pushed it into production. As TV 2 Norway continues to innovate, AWS will remain key to the company’s ability to experiment, scale, and grow into new areas.

Learn more about AWS Media Services, or get in touch with an AWS for Media & Entertainment representative.