# How Netflix Built a Resilient Platform for WWE Raw's Weekly Live Broadcasts

DevFeed: [How Netflix Built a Resilient Platform for WWE Raw's Weekly Live Broadcasts](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/wwe-and-netflix-go-live-loud-and-hopefully-unbreakable-33285.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://8thlight.com/insights/wwe-and-netflix-go-live-loud-and-hopefully-unbreakable>)

Author: Shawn DeVries

Published: 2026-01-06T23:05:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [8th Light Insights](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/8th-light-insights.md>)

Topics: [Netflix](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/netflix.md>), [Streaming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/streaming.md>), [Resilience](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/resilience.md>), [Amazon Web Services](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/aws.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/observability.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data.md>)

Tags: [aws](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/aws.md>), [live-streaming](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/live-streaming.md>), [netflix](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/netflix.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/observability.md>), [platform-innovation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/platform-innovation.md>), [real-time](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/real-time.md>), [resilience](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/resilience.md>), [servers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/servers.md>), [streaming](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/streaming.md>)

## AI overview

This article examines how Netflix engineered a dedicated platform for WWE Raw's weekly live broadcasts. It describes redundant AWS ingest, low-latency CMAF/HLS segments, synchronized manifests, adaptive AVC and HEVC playback, Open Connect CDN delivery, and observability tooling, while noting remaining risks such as startup surges, origin contention, device diversity, and regional edits.

## Source excerpt

What a difference a year makes. When Netflix secured WWE Raw, a three-hour weekly live broadcast with more than three decades of history, it marked a turning point. Raw is chaos in motion: fan-fueled, unpredictable, impossible to rehearse. And now Netflix has to make it flawless. More than a licensing play. It's an engineering gauntlet. Pulling it off means delivering a resilient platform that can handle global, live-grade performance every single week. Raising the Stakes Live streaming has, of course, been around for years. But the expectation that a global service can execute hours of live content flawlessly, at scale, every week, that's new. Raw sets the new bar for resilience. And from here on, every live product will be judged against that standard, whether it's financial trading, real-time auctions, or healthcare collaboration. How Netflix Built for Weekly Live To go beyond its on-demand stack, Netflix built a dedicated live media and data pipeline, piece by piece: Dual ingest with AWS MediaConnect and MediaLive for redundancy at the source. Two-second CMAF/HLS segments tuned for speed without overwhelming origin. Wall-clock aligned manifests to sync across devices and regions, even with edits. Adaptive ladders in AVC and HEVC balancing SD to 4K playback, mindful of constrained devices. Open Connect CDN with 18,000 servers in 6,000 locations, embedded in ISPs to slash startup time. Full-stack observability with Atlas, Mantis, and Lumen, surfacing drift and sync issues before users ever notice. For this approach, Netflix couldn't build on top of an old stack. They're deliberate adaptive platform choices that now set the standard for how live systems must be built. They had to replatform in a way that provided the most elasticity in the future. Fragile Points That Remain Even with this purpose-built pipeline, the weak spots look familiar to anyone running live systems: Start-time surges hammer manifest and session services in the opening seconds. Origin contenti