Kaltura Delivers Record-Scale Live Streaming for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Previews Agentic Avatar Experiences for Live Sports
Kaltura-powered TV services carried more than 1.3 billion playback sessions and peaked at 7 million concurrent sessions across three regions, with AI agents augmenting engineering operations in real time
New York, New York, July 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kaltura (Nasdaq: KLTR), the Agentic Digital Experience company, today announced that its platform delivered live TV streaming for broadcasters and telecom providers throughout the 2026 FIFA World Cup, supporting approximately 40 million registered devices across six production environments in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
The tournament represented the largest live streaming event Kaltura has ever supported, with demand approximately 86% higher than the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Key Performance Highlights
- 1.3 billion+ playback sessions carried across Kaltura-powered TV services throughout the tournament
- 7 million concurrent sessions at peak viewership
- 40 million registered devices across multiple broadcaster and telecom deployments
- 6 production environments operating simultaneously across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East
- 30 million devices monitored daily during active play
Platform Architecture for Unprecedented Scale
To prepare for the 2026 tournament, Kaltura re-architected its media and telecom platform over the four years following the 2022 World Cup, transitioning from a monolithic backend to independent microservices. This architecture enables each service to scale independently and contains any failure within its own boundary, critical when millions of viewers tune in simultaneously in the minutes before kickoff, driving sudden spikes in authentication, entitlement checks, playback requests, and channel changes.
AI Agents in Live Operations
For the first time during a major sporting event, Kaltura deployed an ecosystem of AI agents alongside its engineering teams to manage operations across six concurrent production environments. The agents performed three critical functions:
- Environment health summarization - Consolidating system status across all six environments into real-time operational intelligence
- Match-aware monitoring - Tracking every fixture before, during, and after play, correlating viewership patterns with system load in near real time
- On-demand investigation - Analyzing logs, request volumes, and error patterns at engineering request
Work that previously required engineers to manually refresh dashboards and compile reports over several hours was completed in minutes, allowing engineering teams to focus on operational decisions rather than data gathering.
Agentic Avatars: The Next Step for Live Sports Experiences
Building on the proven scale of its media and telecom platform, Kaltura is now extending its Agentic Avatar capabilities to live sports and entertainment. Agentic Avatars bring real-time, conversational guidance directly into TV, streaming, and service experiences, engaging viewers at the moment of decision with multimodal interaction including voice, text, and visual avatar presence.
For live sports, Agentic Avatars will enable broadcasters and telecom providers to:
- Guide content discovery - Help fans find the right match, replay, or highlight through natural conversation
- Personalize the viewing experience - Surface relevant content based on each household's preferences and viewing history
- Drive service adoption - Explain plans, premium features, and bundles in context, reducing hesitation and increasing conversion
- Support viewers in real time - Resolve common questions and troubleshoot without breaking the viewing experience
Powered by the Kaltura platform's live and on-demand video delivery, real-time APIs connected to catalogs and subscription plans, and telco-grade security and governance, Agentic Avatars deploy globally, support multiple languages, and handle peak traffic without rebuilding existing user experiences.
"If the last World Cup proved we could deliver at this scale, this one proved we could stay ahead of demand that surpassed everyone's estimates, not chase it”, said Tomer Rabinowicz, VP R&D Media & Telecom at Kaltura. “Our AI agents gave engineers more reach and faster answers, so the right attention was on the right environment at every moment. Now we are turning that same intelligence toward the viewer. With Agentic Avatars, the future of live sports is not only about carrying the game reliably at record scale, it is about helping every fan get more out of it."
About Kaltura
Kaltura's mission is to power rich, agentic digital experiences across organizational journeys for customers, employees, learners, and audiences. Its platform combines intelligent content creation, enterprise-grade content management and intelligence, and multimodal conversational engagement capabilities. Kaltura serves leading enterprises, financial institutions, educational institutions, media and telecom providers, and other organizations worldwide. For more information, visit www.kaltura.com.
NoharZmora SVP, Head of Marketing pr.team@kaltura.com
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