Beyond the Goals, Three Ways Momento Scales the Football World Cup in Real Time

 The FIFA World Cup 2026 is not just a tournament for Momento. It is a live fire test of what real-time data at global scale actually means.

In stadiums and on sofas, hundreds of millions of fans will see goals, cards, and heartbreak. Behind the scenes, three of Momento’s largest customers will be doing something just as intense: pushing a real-time data platform to the limit across live origination, content protection, and AI-powered personalization.

Beneath these vastly different workloads lies the same fundamental principle that decisions must be made instantly, at global scale, with zero excuses.

What Do We Mean by “Momento is a Real-Time Data Platform”?

“Data platform” is one of those phrases that can mean anything from a gigantic static data warehouse to a firehose of events in flight. When we say Momento is a real-time data platform, we mean something specific as we combine:

• A sub-millisecond in-memory data engine: This is the RAM-cache based data plane that serves reads and writes in less than a millisecond, even under massive load.
• An intelligent control plane: This layer automatically handles sharding, scaling, partitioning, and hot-key management, so app teams do not have to be distributed systems experts

In practice, customers can treat Momento like a simple API to store and retrieve state in real time: segments and manifests, concurrency counters, user events, AI embeddings, and more. They describe their data model and policy. Momento makes it fast, durable, and observable.

The FIFA World Cup is a perfect way to show what that actually looks like when the stakes are highest. Think of it as a hat-trick of real-time use cases.

1/ A Live Origin That Just Does Not Flinch

Who: A large UK broadcaster holding FIFA rights
Problem: Their live origin service (AWS Elemental MediaStore) was deprecated before the World Cup. They needed the same low latency, failover behavior and observability, at World Cup scale, without rewriting their encoder, packager, video player or CDN configurations.

How Momento helps:
Momento Media Storage is their new live origin. It gives them:

• Predictable, low latency: Consistent latency for reads and writes at the live edge.
• Granular TTL control: TTL settings on manifests/segments to preserve automatic failover capabilities.
• Per-Service Limits and Metrics: Observability and metrics are built in so high traffic events don’t impact the rest of their 24/7 channels.

For viewers, nothing “looks” different. For their ops teams, the origin is now actively developed, supported, faster, and ready for tens of millions of concurrent fans.

🔗 Deep dive on How a major UK broadcaster moved its World Cup live origin to Momento ↗

2/ Content Protection Through Concurrency Tracking

Who: A major US broadcaster holding FIFA rights
Problem: Pirates leverage stolen accounts and run illegal restreaming operations on top of the broadcaster’s own CDN. Traditional DRM and short-lived tokens verify a device can decrypt, but are completely blind to whether an account is behaving like a bot farm. Content rights holders are concerned about piracy and are asking broadcasters to implement server-side control over account behavior to shut down the illegal streams at the source.

How Momento helps:
The broadcaster runs a server-side concurrency service backed by Momento. For each stream, a lightweight verification loop executes three steps:

• Receive the heartbeat: The player calls a Momento-powered service with identifiers for the subscriber’s account, their device, the content they want to access, their geography, etc.
• Enforce stream limits: Verify limits on concurrent streams per account and per event.
• Deliver instant decisions: Make allow/deny decisions in single-digit milliseconds, inline with playback.

If one account suddenly powers hundreds of devices on the same game, the system can automatically shut it down, protecting revenue, CDN bills, and QoE for legitimate fans.

🔗 Details on the architecture and anti-leeching approach:
Stop CDN Leeching with Concurrency Tracking ↗

3/ AI-Powered Personalized Feeds for a Sports App

Who: A US-based popular Sports content Super App
Problem: Just ahead of the World Cup, this content provider wanted to relaunch their app, with a brand new User Experience. Beyond the traditional “click to watch” from their editorial content, they needed a real-time, personalized feed that mixes editorial pieces, highlights, YouTube clips, and content from popular social networks, tuned to each fan’s behavior as it happens. Think of it as a TikTok “For You Page”, for Sports.

How Momento helps:
Momento serves as the real-time event collection and embedding layer, making real-time machine learning models visible to the app users at massive scale:

• Dynamic content ingestion: New content from newsrooms, creators, social networks, and athletes is ingested and turned into AI embeddings.
• Real-time signal streaming: User signals including emoji reactions, comments, watch time, and scroll depth stream into Momento in real time.
• Sub-millisecond personalization: Recommendation services query Momento’s sub-millisecond data plane to match fresh content to each fan’s evolving interests.

The result: A feed that feels instantly relevant and keeps improving as fans interact with their personalized feed, at the scale of millions of concurrent users.

🔗 Video explainer on real-time embeddings with Momento:
Momento AI embeddings & event collection explainer ↗

Let’s Watch Football, Not Infrastructure

Three very different workloads, all powered by the same underlying platform: a low latency data plane with an intelligent control layer that simplifies real-time data usage for application teams.

When the first match kicks off, the fans will be watching football, not infrastructure. But inside control rooms, NOCs, and product teams, our customers will know. They will see cleaner dashboards, stronger protections, and faster feedback loops. They will see a real-time data platform doing exactly what it was built to do.

We are excited to be part of their World Cup story. And once the final whistle blows, these capabilities will not disappear. They will become the new baseline for what fans expect from live sports, everywhere.