Assistant Vice President and Head of Engineering, Airtel Digital For the millions of fervent fans of the Indian Premiere League (IPL), being able to count on a flawless live streaming cricket experience is never up for debate. For Airtel, producing league TV broadcasts with some of the world's most massive concurrent viewership, dropped packets and buffering are simply not options. During the IPL 2026 season, Airtel partnered with Google Cloud to manage this digital delivery. Across 74 matches, the streaming infrastructure delivered several hundred petabytes of egress data.
The final match alone processed tens of billions of requests, hitting a peak egress of several Tbps. Delivering video under these concurrency spikes requires an edge architecture designed strictly around localization, paired with proactive operational monitoring. Our goal for IPL 2026 was to deliver an uninterrupted, stadium-grade viewing experience to cricket fans across India, regardless of concurrency surges or network conditions. Partnering with Google Cloud and using Media CDN gave us deep local edge proximity and excellent cache efficiency.
Combined with proactive match-day real-time monitoring, we delivered a reliable broadcast experience from start to finish. One of the primary challenges in live sports broadcasting is seamlessly handling large traffic spikes and never degrading stream performance or overwhelming backend origins. That’s especially important when millions of viewers simultaneously tune in during a final over because every millisecond counts. To accelerate content delivery across India’s diverse ISP landscape, Airtel leveraged Google Cloud’s Media CDN .
By utilizing Google’s extensive global edge network, Airtel was able to serve viewer requests from edge locations that were physically close to end users. This deep localization was a cornerstone of the broadcast's success, with 99. 9% of all tournament traffic being served locally from within India. This efficient architecture minimized network hops and reduced transit congestion, translating into remarkable infrastructure and viewer experience metrics throughout the 74 matches: Superior caching efficiency: Airtel saw an overall cache hit ratio exceeding 98%.