Bedrock Streaming Delivers a Flawless 2026 World Cup to 60 Million Fans with Fastly
Key results
Delivered a record 2026 FIFA World Cup to 60 million French viewers — over 9 in 10 people in France — with zero back end bottlenecks.
Absorbed massive kickoff and goal-time spikes; when a stream crashed for 22% of users reloading at once, Fastly Compute took the load without a hitch.
Eliminated back end calls for live routes, letting Fastly Compute and the Key Value Store deliver real-time personalization at scale.
Powered M6+'s best-ever numbers: 1M+ concurrent streams, 100 million videos viewed, 11 million active users, 4 million+ new sign-ups.
The challenge
Bedrock Streaming's mission is to create streaming champions for broadcasters across Europe. Supporting platforms like M6+ in France, Videoland in the Netherlands, and RTL+ services in Hungary and Germany, Bedrock serves over 45 million users. Principal Engineer Pascal Martin works on resiliency, stability, reducing costs, and improving performance, while Principal Backend Engineer Valentin Clavreul focuses on building a rock solid platform for customers to deliver streaming to millions.
The company faced two significant challenges during high-traffic events. First, when a match begins, everyone arrives at the same time and launches the livestream simultaneously. Second, when a goal is scored and people hear the roar from the street, they grab their phones to see the moment. This creates massive traffic spikes in a single instant. If a live broadcast crashes, the situation becomes even more critical — everyone reloads at exactly the same time. Years ago, these traffic patterns sometimes overwhelmed Bedrock's back end, preventing people from launching the livestream. With Euro 2024 and the 2026 FIFA World Cup driving increased demand, the team needed a solution that could scale on demand without limits.
The solution
Bedrock had worked with Fastly for years to deliver videos and visual services. They began implementing fallback mechanisms with Fastly, using static files from S3 when the origin was down to improve user experience. A few years ago, Pascal discussed Compute with the Fastly team and found it interesting. He built a few prototypes, and when Euro 2024 came on the horizon, it was the right time to use Compute for real.
With only three months to implement a solution, Bedrock knew their back end capacity was limited. The team needed to rethink their architecture to prevent the back end from being overwhelmed. "We wanted to ensure all users could access the live stream," Pascal said. "We knew if too many people came in at the same time, they might overwhelm our back end. It happened many years ago." The solution needed to provide elasticity and scale fast — and Fastly delivered. Building on that success, Bedrock expanded its use of Compute heading into the 2026 World Cup, offloading even more of the legacy PHP back end onto Go running on Compute.
Handling unprecedented traffic spikes with user-based personalization
User-based personalization is critical for Bedrock's customers because they need personalized ads and subscription-based features. The challenge was delivering different responses for each user while maintaining the compute power to handle millions of requests. Most of the response content would be the same, so Bedrock pre-generated the larger JSON structures and used Fastly Compute to inject user data from the Key Value Store. This architecture preserved personalization without sending every request to the PHP back end.
For the Euro 2024, Bedrock's legacy PHP-based personalization solution had reached its limits. Developed over more than five years, the application couldn't scale fast enough for massive traffic spikes. PHP-FPM allocates one process per request, limiting the total number of concurrent users that can be served. Additionally, scaling in Kubernetes took between 40 seconds and five minutes — too slow when thousands of users arrive simultaneously during a goal or at kickoff. "We needed elasticity, scalability, and Compute running everywhere in the world, close to our users," Valentin said.
Zero back end calls for live routes during critical moments
The instant Bedrock enabled Fastly Compute for the live route during the Euro 2024 the impact was immediate. Every request that had been hitting the PHP back end stopped going there and started flowing through Fastly instead. This freed up PHP processes to handle other types of requests, like video on demand for the small percentage of users not watching the match. During one match, a stream crashed for 22% of users. They all reloaded at the exact same time — and everything worked fine. "Fastly Compute absorbed the load, and we didn't see it at all," Valentin said.
Streaming data with sub-minute latency for real-time personalization
The Key Value Store played a critical role in delivering personalized content at scale. Bedrock needed personalized features for tens of millions of users, including subscription status and user preferences. The team didn't want to access the back end database from Compute, so they stored this information in the Key Value Store instead. Using data streaming pipelines, Bedrock pushed every piece of user data directly into the Key Value Store with sub-minute latency. This allowed Compute to access user information live from the point of presence, delivering dynamic user personalization without back end calls
The Key Value Store's size and robustness opened up future possibilities. "First, the Key Value Store has quite a huge space in it, which really allows us to put a lot of user data for each user," Valentin said. The team is planning to use it for larger personalized workflows, including recommendation features that can be delivered directly from Compute.
Developer experience that fits existing workflows
Bedrock had been moving away from PHP toward Go for several years, so most back end developers were already familiar with the language. Fastly Compute allowed them to code in Go and deploy seamlessly. "Our developers are used to Go and are still using Go with Fastly Compute. The experience is kind of the same," Pascal said. The code was idiomatic Go — developers only needed to use a few libraries to work with Compute. The same code could even be deployed in Kubernetes or Fastly Compute by switching the libraries.
Implementing Fastly Compute required Bedrock to rethink their architecture and reverse it to be more resilient. The new approach pushed data forward to be close to the user at the edge. "Fastly Compute was amazing because the code we used to implement our service was really idiomatic and really close to what we are already doing in our current APIs," Valentin said. The team spent time in Fastly's documentation, which contained a lot of helpful information, and they appreciated when Fastly came to them to help build the solution together.
The Result: a record-breaking 2026 World Cup
The bet paid off. Across the 2026 FIFA World Cup, M6+ — one of the platforms Bedrock powers — posted some of the biggest audience numbers in the channel's history, all delivered without a back end bottleneck:
60 million French viewers — more than 9 in 10 people in France — followed the World Cup on M6 and M6+ from June 11 onward.
Nearly 100% of 25–49 and 15–34 year-olds in France watched the tournament on M6 and M6+.
M6 landed 10 of the year's 10 best television audiences, including 20.2 million viewers for the France–Spain semifinal — the second-best audience in the channel's history.
The Spain–Argentina final drew 12.2 million viewers and a 72% audience share, the best 25–49 performance for a final without France since 2002.
M6 was the #1 national channel among viewers under 50 for the entire tournament, posting its three best weeks ever with up to 33% share among 25–49 year-olds.
On the streaming side, M6+ hit 13 of its best-ever audiences, surpassed 1M concurrent streams on three occasions, 100 million videos viewed, 11 million active users across the competition, and over 4 million new sign-ups — while remaining the most downloaded app on the app stores for the entire tournament.
Bedrock's goal was for users not to notice anything, no matter which system — PHP or Compute — served the request. That held true at a scale far beyond Euro 2024: with millions of simultaneous logins at kickoff and instantaneous spikes on every goal, Fastly Compute and the Key Value Store absorbed the load while keeping personalization, ads, and subscription features running for every one of those millions of fans. "Thanks to Fastly, the 2026 World Cup was the biggest test our platform has ever faced- and it never even slowed down." said Valentin
Looking ahead
Bedrock is continuing to expand its use of Fastly Compute, offloading more workload from backend cluster to the edge. Compute is also helping Bedrock strip 10% of CPU usage from some applications, freeing up resources for more user-focused features. The team is preparing for whatever comes next — planned tentpole events and the unplanned breaking-news moments that drive massive, unannounced traffic. "Our customers have lots of events, planned or not," Pascal said. "People will come, and they won't tell you when."
Key takeaway
Bedrock Streaming needed a solution that could handle massive traffic spikes during live sports events without overwhelming its back end. By implementing Fastly Compute and the Key Value Store, Bedrock achieved elasticity at scale while preserving user-based personalization for tens of millions of users — a strategy the 2026 World Cup put to its biggest test yet, and one it passed with the platform's best numbers on record. "Since we're using Fastly solutions, we have more time to focus on what's providing real value to our customers and our users, while still using the full power of Fastly's network for scalability and resiliency," Valentin said.