Telekom Malaysia scales World Cup 2026 streaming with Baycom, powered by Gcore CDN

When one of the world’s biggest sporting events arrived in 2026, Malaysian football fans expected a seamless viewing experience, regardless of whether they were watching on a television, smartphone, tablet or laptop.

For Telekom Malaysia (TM), the end goal extended beyond broadcasting the tournament. It required the rapid deployment of additional content delivery infrastructure capable of supporting a national audience, fluctuating viewing patterns, and the peak demand that accompanies major live sporting events.

To deliver a seamless viewing experience, TM orchestrated an integrated content delivery ecosystem, combining its network infrastructure, data centres, content delivery strategy and operational expertise. Partnered with the technology capabilities of Gcore and the deployment expertise of Baycom, the partnership successfully delivered a high-performance streaming experience to audiences across Malaysia within a highly compressed deployment timeline.

Delivering at speed under a challenging timeline

Following changes in the broadcast rights landscape, TM moved quickly to provide Malaysian football fans with access to tournament coverage through Unifi TV.

As the service provider responsible for the end-to-end customer experience, TM implemented a multi-CDN delivery strategy that intelligently balances traffic across networks, ensuring resilience, scalability and seamless viewing experiences even during peak demand periods. To ensure seamless content delivery, TM partnered with Baycom using Gcore’s technology as one of the CDN providers to develop and deploy a dedicated private CDN environment exclusively for the tournament.

The task was significant. The team had less than three weeks to design the network, deploy infrastructure, commission the environment and ensure operational readiness before the opening match.

Through close collaboration between TM and Baycom’s CDN teams across multiple locations, the private CDN platform was successfully deployed and integrated into TM’s broader content delivery ecosystem in time for tournament kickoff.

“We had less than three weeks to design the network, ship the gear over from Luxembourg, get it installed in TM Data Centres, tested, ready to go. That’s not a long runway, for something this size. But we made it happen, and it showed us what this partnership can actually deliver when the pressure’s on.”

— Sudesh Kumar Nair, Chief Executive Officer, Baycom Sdn. Bhd.

Supporting a rapidly growing audience

As the tournament progressed, viewership surged, placing increasing demands on the streaming platform. Peak viewership reached approximately 160,000 unique viewers during the final matches, a significant increase from the earlier stages of the competition. Audiences tuned in across a wide range of devices, with smartphones accounting for around 30% of viewership, followed by computers (28%) and TVs (21%), while tablets and other devices made up the remainder. This reflects the growing expectation for premium content to be accessible anytime, anywhere and on any screen.

Accommodating this level of demand required more than network capacity alone. It called for intelligent traffic management, scalable content delivery and a resilient infrastructure capable of maintaining performance during periods of intense concurrent viewership.

“This deployment demonstrates the strength of combining TM’s network, content delivery and service orchestration capabilities with the CDN technology of our partners. TM’s key advantage lies in bringing content delivery, network infrastructure and edge capabilities together within one integrated ecosystem. This enables us to deliver highly customisable CDN solutions tailored to different content, audience and performance requirements. Through close collaboration with Baycom, supported by TM’s multi-CDN strategy and integrated delivery architecture, we successfully scaled to meet growing audience demand while delivering a seamless viewing experience throughout the tournament.”

— Khairul Liza Ibrahim, Executive Vice President, TM Global

The deployment reinforced TM’s ability to integrate content delivery and connectivity within one ecosystem, combining its extensive network footprint, hyperconnected data centres and regionally distributed edge infrastructure to provide highly customisable CDN solutions for different business, audience and performance needs.

Built for live sports, not just live streaming

Live sports remain among the most demanding digital workloads.

Unlike traditional video streaming, audiences tend to join simultaneously at key moments such as kickoff, half-time and full-time, creating significant demand spikes across networks and delivery platforms.

Within TM’s delivery ecosystem, the Baycom deployment provided advanced capabilities including catch-up and restart functionality, enabling viewers to restart matches already in progress or rewind to key moments. The platform also incorporated edge-based security mechanisms that used tokens, time-limited and scoped to each channel’s path to help safeguard premium content and support-controlled content access.

Performance metrics demonstrated the effectiveness of the deployment, with the platform achieving low response times of 4ms, 99.999% of requests processed without errors (a 0.001% error rate), and strong 98% of content serviced directly from TM’s Edge Data Centres during tournament operations. Giving better latency, better origin performance and lower origin cost.

“Live sport is one of the hardest things to stream. Everyone tunes in at kickoff, and if the picture stalls, every viewer notices. Delivering content at the edge, close to viewers, is how we maintained performance as the audience grew sixtyfold.”

— Bojan Savic, Territory Manager, Gcore

Delivering digital experiences through partnership

The World Cup deployment demonstrated what can be achieved when network infrastructure, content delivery capabilities and strong partnerships come together.

For TM, it reinforced its ability to orchestrate complex digital experiences at scale. For Baycom, it demonstrated the value of combining advanced CDN technologies and deployment expertise within a broader service ecosystem.

Most importantly, it provided a real-world example of how organisations can leverage integrated infrastructure to deliver high-performance digital experiences, whether serving audiences in Malaysia or expanding across ASEAN.

For businesses looking to accelerate content, applications and digital services throughout the region, the project serves as a blueprint for how the right ecosystem can transform complexity into scalable growth.

About Gcore

With a globally distributed network of 210+ points of presence (PoPs), Gcore helps businesses deliver digital content quickly, reliably, and at scale.

Our CDN infrastructure is designed to support demanding workloads, high traffic volumes, and rapidly changing audience needs while maintaining strong performance and availability across regions.

For organizations looking for a high-performance CDN with global reach, scalability, and resilience, Gcore provides the infrastructure needed to deliver consistently strong digital experiences.

Contact us to discuss your content delivery needs.