Sony Pictures Network India (SPNI) runs Sony LIV, which is one of the leading popular over-the-top (OTT) video-streaming platform in India. The content offering includes original and acquired TV shows and films, alongside live sporting events. SPNI secured the media rights for the Asia Cricket Council (ACC) from 2025 to 2031, making the Asia Cup Cricket 2025 their first major tournament and a high-stakes debut. During this inaugural tournament, Sony LIV delivered personalized advertisements at scale to a peak of over 10 million concurrent viewers, serving billions of ads across 19 matches. Delivering personalized ad experiences during large-scale live sports streaming requires a highly resilient, latency optimized server-side ad insertion (SSAI) architecture and SPNI achieved it by leveraging AWS Elemental MediaTailor integrated with Google Ad Manager (GAM) as the Ad Decision Server (ADS) in a multi-CDN environment including Amazon CloudFront, maintaining viewer experience and ad delivery at scale throughout the tournament.
The AWS Unified Operations for Media team supported SPNI throughout this journey, working alongside the media specialist team in India. The team worked as an extension of SPNI’s technical team, providing strategic architectural guidance, conducting workflow reviews, coordinating cross-team integrations with partners such as Akamai and GAM, and delivering real-time support during live streaming. This partnership ensured SPNI handled the unprecedented scale and complexity of live cricket streaming with personalized advertising.
Live sports broadcasts present one of the most complex streaming environments like high concurrency, unpredictable viewership spikes, and the need for flawless ad transitions. For this cricket tournament, SPNI wanted to
“Granular playback session level capabilities, combined with ad break type management and MediaTailor’s pre-fetch driven traffic shaping, enable just-in-time strategies that maximize concurrent personalized ad insertion at high scale during live Asia Cup matches, while aligning with Ad Decision Server (ADS) throughput and performance characteristics.” – Mukund Acharya, Chief Technology Officer, Sony Pictures Networks India (SPNI).
The live OTT workflow was architected as a multi-CDN, AWS Elemental media services based SSAI streaming pipeline, designed for scale, personalization, and resiliency:
“AWS Unified Operations for Media along with Solution Architects team worked as a true extension of our team during the Asia Cup. Their designated media streaming experts reviewed our end-to-end workflow and made recommendations to optimize our media pipeline from encoding, ad insertion to delivery. The proactive monitoring, real-time guidance during live matches, and seamless coordination across our partners gave us confidence to deliver flawless experiences to over 10 million concurrent viewers while protecting our advertising revenue. This strategic partnership was instrumental in achieving the scale.” – Mukund Acharya, Chief Technology Office, SPNI, Sony Pictures Networks India
The AWS Unified Operations for Media team provided architectural guidance and live operational support to successfully deliver high viewer concurrency cricket streaming event:
Enhance Streaming Quality with Designated Media Experts: A designated team of media specialists—including Delivery Manager, Media, Monetization, CloudFront, and Live Event Engineers—worked in tandem with SPNI’s team reviewing control plane, media plane, and data plane architecture, delivering context-aware guidance and real-time support throughout the engagement. The team made recommendations to enhance video quality, improve latency performance and resiliency across all Media Services and CloudFront configurations, ensuring broadcast-grade viewer experiences.
Optimized Ad Performance: The Unified Operations for Media team worked very closely with MediaTailor team to validate the performance of the service at scale and collaborated with external partners — Akamai and Google Ad Manager— to optimize workflow for latency, ad fill rate, and ad impression success rate for the high-stake live events.
Operational Excellence Delivered: The Unified Operations for Media team developed joint runbooks with SPNI’s operations team and through load testing, proactive monitoring, and live event support, it ensured SPNI achieved operational readiness—delivering flawless streaming experiences throughout the 19 days of the tournament.
For SPNI, the result was a smooth, monetizable live-streaming distribution at scale. The workflow maintained broadcast-grade latency with seamless mid-roll transitions and stable ad stitching under high concurrency conditions. This deployment redefined what’s possible in live OTT advertising, setting a new benchmark for SPNI’s streaming capabilities.
Based on operational experience of live SSAI workloads for high-concurrency Asia cup event, the following insights were observed:
“AWS is proud to partner with SPNI in transforming how live sports streaming drives business value. Elemental MediaServices which includes MediaTailor in SPNI’s Asia Cup deployment achieved exceptional monetization at scale—maximizing ad fill rates while maintaining premium viewing experiences. AWS Elemental MediaTailor – fully managed, serverless approach along with pre-fetch feature, fundamentally changes the economics of large-scale live sports advertising that aligns with the unpredictable nature of live events”. – Abhijeet Pandey, Head of Core Services, AWS India
This deployment demonstrates how AWS Elemental MediaTailor, combined with AWS Elemental MediaLive, 3rd Party Origin server, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and multi-CDN delivery, can support live streaming of large live sporting events with real-time ad personalization. By leveraging Pre-Fetch, PING tracking, and client-side SDK integration, the customer achieved broadcast-quality ad delivery at unprecedented scale for concurrent users with precision and reliability.
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