World Cup scale: AKTA uses agentic AI and commoditized hardware
AKTA Chief Evangelist Matt Smith discussed the company's live streaming infrastructure strategy for high-scale events like the World Cup. The technical approach leverages containerized microservices, agentic AI at the edge to manage stream quality, and commoditized off-the-shelf hardware to significantly reduce delivery costs. Smith also noted that while Media Over QUIC (MoQ) shows promise, standard HLS remains the reliable backbone for massive live-concurrency events.
Key Takeaways
- Agentic AI handles 95-97% of stream management tasks, with a secondary AI layer verifying performance in milliseconds.
- Delivery infrastructure uses commoditized off-the-shelf hardware, significantly reducing the 'hardware tax' of proprietary $35,000 to $100,000 appliances.
- Real-time routing uses microservices at the edge to bypass regional network outages, such as a recent Sprint disruption in Denver.
- Standard HLS remains the production backbone for massive concurrency, as Media Over QUIC (MoQ) is not yet deemed ready for global-scale events.
Why It Matters
The transition from proprietary hardware to software-defined stacks running on commoditized edge servers represents a fundamental shift in live-streaming economics. By moving AI inference for metadata extraction and stream healing to on-premise GPUs rather than the cloud, AKTA is addressing the rising costs of cloud egress and token-based processing. This localized approach allows for sub-second error correction in FAST channels and high-concurrency sports without the latency or billing unpredictability of centralized cloud workflows. Watch for the broader industry to adopt these 'manager-level' AI systems to maintain five-nines reliability as rights holders demand flawless ad delivery and playback at the scale of 100 million simultaneous viewers.
Additional Context
The technical demands of the 2026 World Cup are unprecedented, with Fox Sports reporting that its opening U.S. coverage across legal TV and streaming platforms like Tubi reached a record 27.5 million viewers, per SportsPro, June 2026. This surge in viewership coincides with a strategic pivot among infrastructure providers toward predictable regional pricing. In June 2026, AKTA announced the general availability of its AI-focused SaaS platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The partnership targets the high egress fees of traditional hyperscalers, with Oracle claiming its networking economics can reduce compute and storage costs by 50% to 80% for broadcasters moving live playout to the cloud, per StreamTV Insider, June 2026. While HLS currently dominates these high-scale events, the industry is closely tracking Media Over QUIC (MoQ) as a future successor. Recent testing by Cloudflare and WINK Streaming has demonstrated MoQ achieving sub-second glass-to-glass latency, specifically in the 200–300ms range, per Medium, April 2026. However, broad deployment remains restricted by legacy device compatibility and a lack of published performance data at the multi-million viewer scale. Consequently, analysts at Streaming Media (June 2026) suggest a hybrid decade where providers use HLS for massive fan-out while testing MoQ for specialized interactive or low-latency segments.
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