The Nasdaq-listed company says its platform handled more than 1.3 billion playback sessions during the tournament while introducing AI agents into live operations and previewing Agentic Avatars for future sports experiences.
Kaltura has announced that its media and telecom platform successfully supported broadcasters and telecom operators during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, delivering more than 1.3 billion playback sessions and reaching a peak of seven million concurrent streaming sessions across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
According to the company, streaming demand during the tournament was approximately 86% higher than during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, making it the largest live streaming event ever supported by Kaltura’s platform.
To prepare for the event, Kaltura completed a multi-year modernization of its media platform, replacing its previous monolithic architecture with a cloud-native microservices design. The new architecture allows individual services—including authentication, entitlement and playback—to scale independently while improving resilience during sudden traffic spikes before matches.
One of the most notable aspects of this year’s deployment was the introduction of AI agents into live production operations. Working alongside engineering teams, the AI agents continuously monitored six production environments, summarized system health, correlated live audience activity with infrastructure performance, and assisted engineers in investigating operational issues in real time. According to Kaltura, operational tasks that previously required hours of manual analysis were completed within minutes.
Building on this infrastructure, Kaltura also unveiled its vision for Agentic Avatars in live sports and entertainment. The AI-powered conversational assistants are designed to help viewers discover live matches and highlights, personalize content recommendations, explain subscription options and provide real-time customer support through voice, text and avatar-based interactions.
“Our AI agents allowed engineering teams to focus on operational decisions rather than collecting data,” said Tomer Rabinowicz, VP R&D Media & Telecom at Kaltura. “The next step is bringing that same intelligence directly to viewers through Agentic Avatars.”
The announcement reflects a broader industry trend in which artificial intelligence is expanding beyond content recommendations to support both large-scale media operations and personalized viewer engagement.
Source: Kaltura
