AWS for M&E Blog
Tubi smashes the Super Bowl live stream record by teaming up with AWS
The most watched sporting event in the United States, the annual National Football League (NFL) championship game is a high stakes broadcast with little room for error. So, when Fox Corporation’s ad-supported streaming service, Tubi, started planning to simulcast FOX’s Super Bowl LIX broadcast, the company immediately focused on preparing its infrastructure to support unprecedented traffic. Its efforts paid off, with 15.5 million peak concurrent streaming viewers and a 13.6 million average minute audience watching the Philadelphia Eagles take on the Kansas City Chiefs on February 9, 2025 through the platform.
Many viewers streamed in 4K HD, with best-in-class latency, and Tubi’s broadcast ultimately reached more than 24 million unique viewers across game day programming, making Super Bowl LIX the most streamed NFL event in history. Built with Kubernetes on HAQM Web Services (AWS), the Tubi platform relies on a range of AWS services and solutions to help evolve its infrastructure setup.
“In sticking with our startup roots, we leverage open-source tech and AWS to help our nimble team swing big. AWS security has become increasingly important as our platform has grown, and AWS Elemental Media Services have helped us prove that a streaming platform can deliver a premier quality experience,” said Mike Bidgoli, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Tubi.
The road to the biggest game yet
Established in 2014 and purchased by Fox Corporation, Tubi has experienced a digital transformation over the last five years. Focusing on growth using scalable cloud-based infrastructure, the platform reported 97 million active users in January 2025 and more than ten billion hours streamed in 2024. However, as a primarily video-on-demand (VOD) service, Tubi traffic has historically been fairly consistent. Preparing to live stream Super Bowl LIX required an entirely different strategy that could support 20x their previous peak audience.
In 2024, Super Bowl LVIII became the most watched NFL championship ever, with 123.4 million tuning in, and an estimated 8.8 million viewers watching the game through live stream. To ensure Tubi could more than meet the live streaming demand for this year, it battle-tested its infrastructure to support at least double the anticipated concurrent traffic. Tubi’s largest live viewing events topped out at a few hundred thousand viewers, making Super Bowl LIX its first massive national audience.
Teaming up with AWS in October 2024, Tubi kicked off an infrastructure overhaul with scalability as the top priority. Streaming the highly anticipated broadcast to millions of viewers around the country required a different approach that would leave no stone unturned.
“Tubi traffic is normally a steady demand curve that’s predictable so it’s easy to scale, whereas the Super Bowl—or any high-demand event—is like a hockey stick. We needed to prepare for a huge audience, not just from a viewing perspective but also in terms of our account services. Using AWS services ensured we could scale up to 1000x in minutes and minimize friction for viewers as much as possible,” Bidgoli explained.
Prioritizing video quality
Tubi had already established a live video pipeline that could support 4K streaming using the AWS Elemental MediaLive broadcast-grade live video processing service. So, it was just a matter of refining its setup for extreme scalability. Processed streams were packaged for distribution across the 29 connected devices supported by Tubi using AWS Elemental Media Services. This included cross-region failover to verify stream stability, and then delivered to audiences by using the HAQM CloudFront content delivery network (CDN).
Along with bolstering scalability, the Tubi team optimized stream types so that viewers accessing the game would have a high-quality experience, whether tuning in from the latest devices or legacy hardware.
Overhauling account services
Typically, Tubi users have the option of whether or not to create an account. This enhances the viewing experience by allowing viewers to save content to watch later, surfacing personalized content recommendations and more. However, to help manage the huge influx of traffic for Super Bowl LIX, Tubi implemented mandatory registration to view the game. Minimizing potential failure points, Tubi bolstered its account services workflow and streamlined its home page functionality for enhanced experience stability.
“Our North Star was to architect the capability to sign up millions of new users in minutes. We made all our decisions working backwards from that end goal. Two important aspects of this were load testing our services up to 1000x our normal load, and ensuring that our product UX could handle any backend services error and let users watch the big game,” noted Bidgoli.
Tubi also migrated its account services database to HAQM DynamoDB for enhanced scalability and began leveraging HAQM Simple Email Services (HAQM SES) to manage high volume email automation. For streamlined monitoring and reporting between AWS services, Tubi uses HAQM CloudWatch. Additionally, AWS Shield prevents DDoS attacks, without impacting platform performance, while AWS WAF provides firewall protection. Other key pieces of Tubi’s architecture include HAQM Elastic Compute Cloud (HAQM EC2), HAQM Simple Storage Services (HAQM S3), and HAQM Data Firehose and HAQM Kinesis for near real-time data stream loading and analysis.
Following the success of the Super Bowl LIX collaboration, Tubi is already considering its next challenge, with AWS support. Bidgoli concluded, “We worked hand-in-hand with Fox Sports and AWS to pull off one of the largest streaming experiences yet. It’s a testament to what can be achieved with an ambitious mindset and the right partners.”
Learn more about scaling live video workflows, or get in touch with an AWS for Media & Entertainment representative.