Earlier this year, Hydrolix provided real-time insights on hundreds of terabytes of log data for FOX at Super Bowl LIX. And at NAB 2025, we talked to some very special guests about it: Dilip Singh, FOX Corporation’s Sr. Director of Video Engineering, Catherine Johnson, Hydrolix Field CTO, and Todd Persen, Hydrolix CTO. The topic? Observability at scale for the biggest live event on the planet: Super Bowl 2025.
You can watch the full panel discussion on YouTube.
As Todd said at NAB, this wasn’t just the Super Bowl of observability—this was the actual Super Bowl! Viewers expected flawless live streaming experiences, and subpar experiences should never end up being a bigger story than the final score.
According to Dilip, “Success is when people are able to watch without re-clicking the ‘watch again’ button. Basically, you get in the stream… [and] you enjoy the game. You don’t have to worry.”
Hydrolix was the sole multi-CDN provider for FOX during the game, and ingested the equivalent of 1.4 petabytes of data a day over the course of the event. It took less than ten seconds from data ingest to visualization (time to glass), and the p50 query response time was under half a second. This is in contrast to previous broadcasts. “Back in 2020-23, our logging solution was not robust and we had almost zero visibility into what was going on in the delivery pipeline,” Dilip said.
“I was super happy with the performance and the observability piece of [Hydrolix]. We never had that before in previous Super Bowls.”
– Dilip Singh, Sr. Director of Video Engineering, FOX Corporation
Hydrolix and FOX spent months gearing up for the big game, though not everything could be pre-planned. As Todd said, “If the game had been different, if the score had been different at halftime, the traffic could have been totally different.” Viewership tends to peak during exciting moments, and can spike or drop depending on the flow of the game. Unless you have a crystal ball, there is simply no way to provision perfectly in advance.
The panel described game day as a lively and exciting scene. Fox and Hydrolix engineers worked elbow-to-elbow, focused on real-time dashboards which showed potential performance bottlenecks and other issues. Dilip recalled the urgency in the room, with team members shouting out requests for specific data as viewership rose—errors like 4XXs and 503s, spikes in traffic from outside the US, and custom views tailored to executives, engineers, and CDN partners. Each group had different priorities. For example, the executive team needed a big-picture overview while engineers required queryable, real-time insights to troubleshoot issues as they arose.
Across every CDN in their stack, Hydrolix provided a unified view into the performance, delivery, and viewer experience.
According to Dilip, when Fox looked at viewer feedback across social media, “Everybody had good things to say about the game. So that was a success.”
By the numbers, Hydrolix ingested nearly 200 terabytes of log data over the course of the event.
Catherine cited the 16X raw data compression and a 98.4% row reduction for summary tables, which hold aggregated data, as signs of great performance during the game. She noted that Hydrolix ingested 17.4 gigabytes of data per second “and we were still getting most queries back in half a second. And each dashboard had like 100 queries per dashboard. So each of those reloading all the time was running at least 100 queries every single time.” This level of performance was in large part possible due to summary tables, which aggregate data on the fly for valuable metrics. Meanwhile, Fox could still query the underlying raw data as needed.
A freight train of incoming data, all instantly searchable, all delivering real-time insights. According to Dilip, this meant immediate visibility into the end-user experience across every CDN.
When the stakes are so high, you need more than just dashboards. You need answers. In Dilip’s words, “I was super happy with the performance and the observability piece of it. We never had that before in previous Super Bowls.” With data being almost real-time, “we were able to take actions on the data we were seeing in the dashboard.”
Next Steps
- Watch the full panel discussion on YouTube.
- Learn more about Hydrolix on AWS.
- Check out Hydrolix on the AWS Marketplace.
