Hey everyone!

Streaming live events like the FIFA World Cup brings an insane technical challenge: unlike Netflix where video files are pre-rendered and cached days ahead, live sports video literally doesn't exist until the split-second it happens. Millions of users request the exact same segments simultaneously the instant a goal is scored.

During TelevisaUnivision's 2026 World Cup coverage (104 matches, 675M views, zero downtime), Google Cloud deployed a pretty fascinating multi-layer architecture to survive the "thundering herd" problem:

1️⃣ Dual-Ingest via SRT & RTMP

Live broadcast signals leave the stadium as two parallel streams. SRT (running over UDP with fixed-window packet recovery) is used for lossy links, while RTMP (TCP-based) is kept for compatibility.…