WrestleMania 42 generated more than 1.3 billion views on social media. It took place in Las Vegas just a few miles down the road from NAB, where media broadcasters came together over the theme of “storytelling meets scale.”
WrestleMania is a perfect example of the stakes that come with delivering a major event. A billion views can elevate your brand and generate major revenue, but that level of visibility also comes with major risks if viewers are posting on social media about buffering issues, black screens, or other problems.
That’s why delivering the story is just as important as telling it. CDN infrastructure is responsible for providing a high quality of experience when millions of viewers tune in globally. But at this scale, something can and will go wrong. Operations teams must find and fix these issues as quickly as possible during high-stakes events.
Every streaming broadcaster at NAB 2026 faced a version of this problem: how do you deliver at the global scale necessary to tell the story well? Visibility is a critical piece of the equation. You need real-time analytics even when your CDN infrastructure generates terabytes or petabytes of log data per day. Without that visibility, incidents take longer to detect and resolve, and there are no do-overs when your customers expect a great streaming experience right now.
At NAB, we focused on showing how Hydrolix can help broadcasters deliver better experiences at scale, with use cases ranging from unified CDN visibility to agentic operations. And we received major validation that our solutions were delivering in the form of a Best of Show award for CDN Insights.
Built for CDN Visibility at Scale
When something goes wrong during a high-stakes event, you need to know immediately, across your entire delivery network, with enough detail to act. CDN Insights gives you a unified view of how your entire CDN infrastructure is performing across providers, with the ability to drill down into individual regions, ASNs, and raw logs in seconds, across petabytes of data.
Independent judges at NAB Show agreed on the value it brings, awarding CDN Insights Best of Show in the ITPro category. It’s the second consecutive year Hydrolix has been recognized at NAB Show, following the 2025 Product of the Year award for monitoring and measuring tools.
As Simon Ouderkirk, VP of Product, put it: “The old way of managing CDN performance—manual pipelines, sampled data, and siloed dashboards—simply doesn’t work when your company relies on the internet to deliver outcomes.”
Agentic AI and the Future of CDN Monitoring
CDN monitoring has always been a challenge due to the scale of data and because it arrives in formats that vary by provider. In their Streaming Summit session, “Fewer Outages, Better Streams: What AI-Powered CDN Monitoring Actually Looks Like in Practice,” Simon Ouderkirk and Jonathan Mercereau (Principal SRE, NVIDIA) addressed this directly: agentic AI creates a real opportunity, but there are few out-of-the-box products that can help. Getting useful output requires investing in context, guardrails, and iteration before you need the agent to perform.
Mercereau made this concrete with an incident story. He resolved a significant CDN problem, from detection to resolution, in just nine minutes with help from a natural language query against Hydrolix data. That speed was possible because he had spent several hours ahead of time getting the agent properly configured, and because Hyydrolix makes full-fidelity data available in seconds.
From Incident Resolution to Next-Gen Delivery
Hydrolix showed up at NAB with hands-on working solutions for a variety of critical use cases. Across three locations on the show floor, we demonstrated what real-time CDN visibility looks like in practice:
- Hydrolix booth: CDN Insights and agentic analytics powered by the Hydrolix MCP Server, showing operators how to get answers from petabyte-scale CDN data in plain language.
- AWS booth: Hydrolix as the log data layer in AWS’s Agentic Intelligent Operations solution, built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, demonstrating automated detection and resolution of live streaming degradation events.
- Cloudflare booth: A Media over QUIC demo showing CDN monitoring wired into next-generation delivery infrastructure.
- CacheFly booth: CDN Insights, with CacheFly a new partner in the Hydrolix CDN Insights ecosystem.
- Varnish booth: CDN Insights, with Varnish a new partner in the Hydrolix CDN ecosystem.
The next image shows the Hydrolix booth before NAB started. The booth was packed throughout the entire event!
To make our solutions better, we were listening as much as demonstrating. We ran a qualitative research initiative that included 30-minute interviews with data and engineering leaders on AI readiness for log data, with questions about what’s functional today, what’s blocking progress, and where the industry is actually headed. The findings will be paired with a quantitative survey and published as a full industry report later this year. They’ll also help us develop products that solve the biggest data challenges facing the media and entertainment industry.
Next Steps
- Didn’t get a chance to see CDN Insights in action at NAB? Check out the CDN Insights demo: Unified Visibility at Global Scale.
- Request a demo of CDN Insights or contact us to see what full-fidelity, real-time CDN visibility looks like.
