No Second Chances: Why Streaming Providers Should Embrace a Unified Observability Approach to Avoid Costly Site Failures
During marquee live events like the Super Bowl, the Grammys, and the Olympics, audiences expect crystal-clear, real-time viewing without interruption. Millions of people watch simultaneously, and advertisers pay record-breaking sums to get their products in front of viewers. Behind the scenes, that creates major pressure for streaming providers. Even a brief outage can turn into an irreversible mistake that makes global headlines.
In the media and entertainment industry, high-impact outages cost an average of $2 million per hour, according to New Relic’s 2025 Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment. Unlike on-demand streaming, where customers might attempt to reload their movie or television program, live viewers are likely to seek out another provider. In this environment, delivering flawless live experiences isn’t optional, it’s critical to business survival.
Last year, a Netflix livestream outage that lasted six hours during a popular boxing match made front-page news. Such failures underscore how quickly technical issues can fracture customer trust, especially among live audiences which can be unforgiving. As a result, providers can’t rely on patchwork fixes or dashboard-based troubleshooting. Success or failure depends on how well the tech stack is prepared for peak moments.
Four Steps For Building A Resilient Tech Stack
Livestream providers that maintain loyal customer bases are the ones that invest in resilience, observability, and redundancy long before the coin toss or opening act. Here are four technologies that media and entertainment businesses should invest in to deliver the optimal viewing experience: .
- Conduct Complete Load Testing: To minimise the risk of outages, livestream providers should conduct rigorous load testing well in advance of Super Bowl-sized events. These tests should go beyond video streaming to include the full user experience — from signup and payment to account modification flows. Load test data should also be generated while an observability platform monitors end to end system performance, using the same alert profiles and configurations that will run "for real" during the event. This approach equips teams with the detailed insights they need to evaluate performance and strengthen resilience before game day.
- Take a Unified Observability Approach: Observability gives IT teams the ability to understand the internal state of a complex software system by examining the data it produces from the outside. It allows engineering teams to ask any question they can think of about their system's behavior, and get the answers they need to resolve issues fast. The most impactful approach for media and entertainment companies is a unified observability approach that breaks down silos between video delivery, ad insertion, and OTT applications. This provides visibility into network performance for stakeholders across smart TVs, mobile apps, and browsers, where failures are typically felt first. The real advantage, however, is that unified observability helps teams move beyond knowing that an issue exists to understanding why it’s happening. In a non-unified setup, fragmented tools may flag that videos take 10 seconds to start, but not reveal that a configuration change or upstream service dependency caused it. Unified visibility connects those dots, enabling faster, more confident resolutions.
- Enable Real-Time Telemetry: Continuous data collection through real-time telemetry is also essential for detecting issues at the root rather than merely responding to surface-level alerts. While nearly every tool claims to offer “real-time” insights, the real impact comes when that data is unified. Once telemetry from across systems is brought together under a single observability platform, its value grows exponentially, enabling machine learning to perform anomaly detection and correlation across all data sources. This unified, real-time visibility helps teams identify emerging issues sooner, surface recommended fixes, and shorten mean time to resolution.
- Consider a Multi-CDN Strategy: Providers should rethink their content delivery network (CDN) strategy. A CDN is a distributed system of servers positioned to accelerate and stabilise video or online content. For live streaming, CDNs help minimise buffering by routing content through the server closest to each viewer. However, relying on a single CDN provider comes with limitations, especially in the face of traffic surges that are inevitable during major live events. Organisations should assume their primary and even secondary CDNs will fail at some point and proactively, continuously test them for failover. This approach safeguards both performance and viewer experience when it matters most.
When the World Is Watching, Preparation Is Everything
The future of resilient streaming lies in providers’ ability to correlate issues across the delivery chain automatically. For example, a backend Amazon Web Services configuration change that suddenly disrupts live playback should be flagged and correlated instantly, not discovered hours later. Observability is the foundation for assisted remediation with human-in-the-loop approval—a process that combines the speed of automated systems with the judgment of a human expert—and is key to building reliable architectures.
As automation accelerates across the industry, nearly a third of media and entertainment organisations say AI adoption is already shaping their observability strategy, according to the New Relic report. Providers that embrace this shift will resolve incidents faster, create more time for innovation, and deliver smoother experiences when the world is watching.
Live events can be unforgiving; there’s no replay button for lost trust. When it comes to live streaming, the difference between success and failure depends largely on technical readiness. Providers who invest year-round in observability, redundancy, and proactive resilience are the ones viewers will remember for the right reasons.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from New Relic. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]