Ukraine’s First Online Broadcast of a Global Sports Event

In 2010, Ukraine had its first online broadcast of a global sports event.
It was the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, and our team was responsible for the technical implementation.

At that time, online video delivery for major live sports events was still an emerging challenge for the Ukrainian media market.

11 June 2010. South Africa and Mexico opened the first FIFA World Cup ever held on the African continent. Shakira performed Waka Waka at the stadium, and Ukrainian viewers watched the World Cup online.

That year, ICTV held the exclusive rights to broadcast the FIFA World Cup in Ukraine and needed to make the matches and related programmes available online.

The project covered the full workflow required to bring live video to online viewers:

• video preparation for online distribution
• web portal and application support
• user access management
• browser plugin integration
• authorisation and statistics
• geo-blocking
• DRM integration
• main and backup technical nodes in Cosmonova’s data centres
• unicast video retransmission over the internet

The video was prepared in two quality profiles, allowing viewers to choose the stream that matched their network capacity.

The result was Ukraine’s first successful online broadcast of a global sports event, technically delivered by our team.

And this year, the football story came back.
11 June. The FIFA World Cup opening again. Mexico vs South Africa again.
Shakira on the stadium stage again.
A beautiful football flashback.

Today, Cosmonova Broadcast continues that expertise at a new technological level.
Our live event infrastructure is built to ingest, process, and deliver video from source to destination with IP-based distribution, CDN delivery, geo-redundant EU infrastructure, real-time monitoring, and technical coordination with broadcast teams.

The tools have changed, but the key principle remains the same: broadcast and streaming workflows must be prepared long before the event begins.