A sports streamer where every viewer pulled segments from origin

A sports streamer where every viewer pulled segments from origin

A regional sports service streamed live matches in HLS. The video segments cached fine, but the manifest carried a unique per-user token in the URL, so each viewer's segment requests had distinct cache keys — 12,000 concurrent fans meant 12,000 cache misses for the same six-second chunk. The origin's egress hit 9Gbps and started dropping segments mid-match.

The token belonged in a header, not the path.

What we changed: moved authentication to a signed cookie validated at the edge, and stripped the token from the cache key so every viewer shared one cached segment per chunk. The edge authorized; the cache deduplicated.

Origin egress collapsed from 9Gbps to 140Mbps. Segment cache-hit ratio rose from 8% to 99.1%. Rebuffering during the next match fell 81%, and the origin never approached saturation.

The number that mattered: origin egress 9Gbps to 140Mbps.