The Fastly platform supports delivery of all major HTTP video streaming formats — including live, linear, and user-generated video — on any public or private headend deployment.
Our Streaming Media Delivery solution enables you to deliver live video over common HTTP streaming formats, including Apple’s HLS and MPEG-DASH. And with built-in elasticity, we can scale to accommodate the largest audiences.
Improved performance
Easily define failover scenarios to ensure viewers don’t experience interruptions. Take it a step further with our Live Event Monitoring Service, where we monitor your scheduled event's performance and help troubleshoot issues. Let us help ensure your live event goes flawlessly.
Improved response times
Fastly keeps connections between our POPs and your infrastructure open to minimize latency associated with fetching the latest live chunks from origin. You’ll see improved response times for your viewers, letting them consume your stream as close to live as possible.
Maintain uptime and availability
Quickly scale for traffic spikes during major live events without interruption. We handle high request volumes, streaming content without waiting for complete downloads and our network employs self-healing, real-time fault detection and mitigation to address internet weather challenges.
Features
Real-time visibility
With real-time streaming logs, you can monitor infrastructure performance. Paired with granular controls and immediate config changes, you can troubleshoot issues before they substantially impact viewers.
Media Shield
Fastly’s Media Shield for Live streamlines existing multi-CDN deployments while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your streaming services.
Live Event Monitoring Service
If you are anticipating a large live or high traffic event, Fastly offers a powerful combination of Customer Support expertise and real-time data to alert you as we detect issues with internet congestion and upstream or downstream providers.
Top partners and integrations
We integrate with top partners to offer joint customers an enhanced end-to-end video workflow. We have built-in integrations with infrastructure-as-a-service providers like Google Cloud Platform and video workflow management services like Wowza Media Systems.
Scale to meet peak demands
Streaming Media
“Fastly also does a great job caching our content, helping us achieve the scale we need to meet our peak demands while making sure our streaming costs are manageable as traffic increases.”
With high quality-of-experience expectations around live-streaming events, no content owner can afford not to have the right plan in place. Here are the crucial steps to take when planning your live-streaming event.
Low-latency live streaming is more relevant than ever. New user experiences, like quizzes and real-time voting, built around content and entertainment must be available with little to no delay. In this post, we look at the business cases that warrant low-latency HTTP live streaming.
Fastly Media Shield brings the best of both worlds: lowering costs by reducing traffic to origin and maintaining high performance as well as low latency.
Read the datasheet
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a live streaming CDN, and how does Fastly support live media at scale?
A live streaming CDN distributes live media streams through a globally distributed edge network to minimize latency, reduce buffering, and maintain stream quality under high concurrency. Fastly’s live streaming CDN is built on a programmable edge platform that enables real-time content delivery, rapid cache invalidation, and fine-grained traffic control—making it well suited for large-scale live video and interactive media streaming use cases.
How does Fastly reduce latency for live video streaming?
Fastly reduces latency by caching and delivering live video streams as close to viewers as possible using its global edge network. Features like real-time log streaming, instant configuration updates, and advanced request routing allow teams to optimize the media stream path dynamically, helping maintain consistent performance even during traffic spikes or breaking live events.
What live streaming protocols and formats does Fastly support?
Fastly supports industry-standard live streaming protocols and formats, including HLS and DASH, as well as Low-Latency HLS (LL-HLS), Low-Latency DASH (LL-DASH), and HESP. This ensures compatibility across modern browsers, mobile devices, smart TVs, and OTT platforms while enabling ultra-low-latency delivery for interactive and real-time use cases.
With support for both traditional and low-latency streaming workflows, engineering teams can deliver broadcast-scale live media experiences without being locked into proprietary formats or rigid delivery architectures.
How does Fastly handle traffic spikes during large live streaming events?
Fastly’s platform is designed to absorb sudden surges in demand common with live video CDN workloads, such as product launches, sports, or news events. With a highly scalable edge network and real-time observability, teams can monitor media streaming performance, mitigate origin overload, and respond instantly to changing traffic patterns. To protect origins, Fastly uses request collapsing, consolidating simultaneous requests for the same live segment into a single origin fetch and serving the response to all viewers.
For high-stakes broadcasts, teams can leverage Fastly Live Event Monitoring for white-glove support, Capacity Reservation to pre-allocate delivery capacity, and Media Shield to centralize and protect origin traffic. Combined with real-time observability, these capabilities ensure predictable performance at scale without compromising viewer experience.
Can Fastly help protect live streaming content from abuse and attacks?
Yes. Fastly integrates security directly into its edge platform to protect live streaming workflows from DDoS attacks, malicious bots, scraping, credential abuse, and unauthorized access.
Security capabilities include edge-based DDoS mitigation, bot detection and mitigation, rate limiting, IP and geo controls, and token-based authorization to validate viewers before delivering segments or manifests. Teams can enforce signed URLs, short-lived tokens, and custom access logic at the edge to prevent stream hijacking and content theft.
Because these controls run at the edge, protection is applied without adding latency to the live stream, ensuring performance and security operate together at broadcast scale.
How does Fastly support customization and control for live streaming workflows?
Fastly’s programmable edge allows developers and engineers to customize request handling, caching logic, authentication, and headers for live streaming CDN workflows. This level of control enables teams to tailor live media delivery to specific application requirements, regional needs, or business rules—all without redeploying backend systems.
What metrics are available for live media streaming?
Fastly provides granular, real-time and historical metrics across the full delivery path, from edge to origin. Key metrics include request volume, latency, cache hit ratio, origin fetch performance, error rates, and status codes, giving teams deep visibility into live stream health and viewer experience.
Data is accessible through streaming logs, dashboards, and APIs, enabling integration with existing observability and analytics platforms. Teams can also configure alerts based on thresholds or anomalies to proactively respond to performance degradation, origin stress, or unexpected traffic patterns during live events.
How does Fastly’s live streaming solution fit into a modern media streaming architecture?
Fastly is designed to integrate seamlessly into modern cloud-native and multi-CDN architectures. It works alongside origin servers, encoding pipelines, DRM providers, and analytics platforms to deliver live media efficiently while giving teams full control over performance, security, and cost.
With capabilities like Media Shield, teams can introduce an additional caching layer that centralizes and protects origin traffic, improves cache efficiency, and reduces origin egress costs. This architecture strengthens resilience while maintaining low latency and high availability.
The result is a flexible, programmable delivery layer that gives engineering teams precise control over performance, security, and cost across complex live streaming workflows.
Is Fastly suitable for enterprise and mission-critical live streaming use cases?
Yes. Fastly’s live streaming CDN is built for enterprises that require high availability, low latency, and operational transparency. It’s used by organizations delivering business-critical live video and media streams where reliability, performance, and real-time control are non-negotiable.
For high-profile or large-scale broadcasts, teams can leverage Fastly Live Event Monitoring for proactive monitoring and white-glove operational support before and during events. Combined with Fastly’s programmable edge and real-time observability, this ensures predictable performance and rapid response when it matters most.
