Streaming Cricket in India
Cricket is not just a sport in India. It’s the fabric of society and delivering it to tens of millions of people at the same time is the ultimate stress test for live streaming infrastructure.
After a successful partnership to stream the IPL in India, Akash Saxena, CTO of JioStar, spoke with Xavier Leclercq, VP Business Development at Broadpeak, about what it takes to stream live cricket to audiences measured in tens of millions
The conversation focused on practical challenges: sudden traffic spikes, infrastructure choices, monetization at scale, and constant pressure from piracy.
Live streaming at a scale few platforms face
For JioStar, traffic does not build gradually. It jumps. Key moments in a match can trigger 4 to 5 million additional viewers within seconds.
The IPL has already set major concurrency milestones, from 32 million streams in 2023 to 63 million in 2024 and 55 million in 2025, and teams are now preparing for events that could approach 100 million concurrent viewers within a few years.
At that level, the challenge is not average traffic. It is handling sharp, unpredictable surges across mobile devices and connected TVs, without service degradation.
That is the reality JioStar is engineering for.
Hybrid delivery as a strategic choice
To sustain this scale, JioStar relies on a hybrid delivery architecture, combining public cloud CDNs with infrastructure deployed deep inside telecom networks.
Broadpeak plays a role in this ecosystem as a technology partner, contributing to content delivery for live cricket events.
As Akash explains, no single CDN can handle this level of demand alone. The goal is proximity: getting content as close as possible to users to improve quality, reduce latency, and control costs.
This engineering approach is driven by the sheer scale of the task: resilience, efficiency, and control designed in from the start.
And once delivery reaches this scale, monetization has to evolve with it.
When scale reshapes monetization
Monetization changes once audiences reach this size.
Traditional live ad models stopped working early on, leading JioStar to build its own server-side ad insertion solution, which had been in use since 2019. Advertising decisions today are tightly coupled with delivery and playback systems, and must scale to tens of millions of simultaneous streams.
At this point, monetization is no longer something layered on top of streaming. It is part of the core platform.
Piracy as a built‑in constraint
Piracy is not a side issue. It is a core operational risk. During some live events, JioStar has observed and successfully stopped high levels of traffic classified as malicious or illegal.
That level of leakage affects revenue, infrastructure costs, and overall platform stability. As a result, anti‑piracy measures, identity checks, entitlement control, fraud detection, and enforcement, are treated as first‑class system components, not add‑ons.
Which means scale is not only about capacity. It is also about control.
Planning for the unpredictable
As the audiences grew, JioStar also had to evolve how it operates live events. For the biggest matches, teams still work from dedicated “war rooms,” monitoring dashboards and reacting in real time. But with at this scale, with delivery, advertising, playback, subscriptions systems all running simultaneously, human oversight alone is no longer enough.
Automation is increasingly part of the operating model, with teams stepping in when needed. Reliability comes down to preparation and consistency, not last-minute fixes.
To hear Akash Saxena walk through these challenges and explain how live streaming at this scale actually works, watch the full interview with Xavier Leclercq below.
