Netskrt Systems is a content delivery network built for some of the biggest nights in streaming. Today, the company operates about 1,400 points of presence and delivers roughly 500 live events each year for some of the world's largest streaming platforms. When millions of people tune in to the same live game, Netskrt delivers content deep inside ISP networks—closer to viewers, where milliseconds matter. Its predictive, title- and network-aware platform positions video-on-demand (VOD) content where it is needed before viewers press play, so someone streaming on a small rural network can get the same fast, reliable experience as a viewer in a major city.

Live sports are among the most demanding workloads on the internet. A single event can take a network from near-idle to full capacity in minutes, producing peak-to-average ratios as high as 15 to 1—a traffic pattern the traditional, metro-concentrated CDN model was never built to absorb. To win over some of the world's largest content owners, Netskrt needed to differentiate itself by bringing enormous capacity online on demand and placing it closer to their viewers. Building the conventional way, with data center space, cages, hardware, and months of lead time, forces providers to pay year-round for capacity that sits idle between the biggest live-streaming events. Instead, Netskrt takes a different approach, running its private CDN on Lumen® Edge Bare Metal infrastructure and the Lumen IP backbone.

The impact of this partnership is visible in the company's growth. Netskrt expects to reach 150 Tbps of network capacity by the end of 2026, a pace it attributes in part to working with large network and bare metal suppliers such as Lumen.¹ Capacity at that scale is what attracts some of the world's largest content owners, whose events can draw millions of viewers within minutes and start on schedule whether the infrastructure is ready or not. The ability to add that capacity quickly and economically gives Netskrt a competitive advantage as it pursues some of the industry's largest live and on-demand streaming opportunities. With Lumen, Netskrt is ready.

Closer to the viewer, better economics

For all the attention paid to rights deals and star talent, a live event succeeds or fails at the last mile, where content finally reaches the viewer. Conventional CDNs concentrate hundreds of points of presence around major metropolitan areas. When tens of millions of people press play at once, that model strains, leaving the hardest-to-reach networks underserved.

Netskrt's answer is to operate inside the ISP network itself, using predictive intelligence to place content where demand will occur before it does. Roughly half of the company's capacity now sits embedded in last-mile ISP networks.¹ Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Moira Dang explained, "What really sets us apart is that we are so deep in the network. Being in the last mile is one thing. Supporting the dynamic nature of live events when millions of people press play at once is another." Dang continued, "Much of the industry's infrastructure investment is concentrated around the largest tier-one networks. But subscribers expect the same streaming performance and reliability whether they're watching from a major network or an independent ISP. Quality of experience shouldn't depend on where you live or who provides your connectivity."

Proximity to viewers improves both performance and cost efficiency. Serving from inside the ISP network means a request that misses one cache is answered a layer above it rather than traveling all the way back to the customer's origin. "It speeds up delivery," Dang said, "and it also saves our customers money, because if you're hitting their origin consistently, they're paying for that egress traffic." For a content owner weighing reliability against the cost of delivery, quality and efficiency go hand in hand.

A market that rewards reliability

The stakes keep rising. Digital platforms have overtaken traditional television for live sports in the United States, and more than 127 million Americans are expected to stream live sports online by 2027.² As audiences move online and formats grow richer, delivery infrastructure has become a critical link in the streaming value chain, with platforms increasingly selecting partners based on their ability to maintain quality at scale. "It's not just that the audience is growing. It's that it is simultaneous consumption," Dang said. "It's a larger audience, but people expect quality to continue to improve. And the economics still need to work." That combination plays to Netskrt's strengths.

Capacity in hours, not months

Live sports create a challenge that few infrastructure models are built to solve. The largest events demand enormous capacity, but only for a brief window of time. "The biggest economic challenge of live streaming is the peak-to-average gap," Dang noted. "Think of a live event where you need this peak capacity for maybe three to four hours, and once that's over, you probably don't need it until the next event." A permanent build carries that cost every hour it sits idle. Consuming capacity as needed, rather than owning it year-round, is what makes the model work.

The pattern repeats every season. Ahead of football season, Netskrt and Lumen expand the footprint by hundreds of servers and tens of terabytes per second of network capacity, carry it through the playoffs and championships, and then release it. That same infrastructure supports major sports league broadcasts throughout their seasons. A recent 200-server expansion came online within days of handoff. Co-Founder, President and CEO Sig Luft remarked, "When we spin up with Lumen, it takes a few hours, and we'll have as much as 20 Tbps online. To put that in context, that's about 4 million high-definition viewers."

The most concentrated example lasted a single weekend. "For last year's Super Bowl, we spun up an additional five terabits per second on a Friday, delivered the event on the Sunday, and tore it down again on the Monday," Luft said. "We did this with Lumen. That is one of the strongest capabilities we have together. To my knowledge, nobody else has done such a thing."

Behind that flexibility is a deployment model built for speed. Because its platform runs on Edge Bare Metal rather than in facilities Netskrt owns, adding capacity is a software deployment rather than a construction project. "Most traditional CDNs struggle because an infrastructure build is a six-to-nine-month project, and it's a permanent build," Dang said. Working with Lumen helps eliminate some of the slowest steps. "Lumen gives us that ability, with a reach that we don't need to be purchasing, deploying and negotiating cross-connects and colocation for," she added. "But equally important is that we can consume that capacity very quickly."

A partnership built to grow

Netskrt selected Lumen for the Lumen IP backbone, its peering relationships, and an edge footprint already lit across the United States and Canada. Roughly 620 Netskrt edges now span 44 Lumen locations, forming the layer the company can scale fastest, while more than 500 additional edge locations are embedded inside the ISP networks that serve viewers directly. "Lumen represents roughly half of our network when we bring everything up for sports season," Luft emphasized.

The footprint is only part of the story. Delivering a major live event requires not only infrastructure at scale but also a partnership capable of supporting the teams responsible for operating it. "When we have a tier-one event, Lumen's on the call with us," Dang said. "It takes the platform, the software, the operations team and our partners working together to make that event successful." During major broadcasts, Netskrt, its streaming customers and Lumen work as a single team, monitoring performance in real time and addressing issues before viewers ever experience them. "The infrastructure should be invisible to them," Dang explained. "They should simply experience a stream that works." That level of engagement is what elevates the relationship beyond infrastructure. "If we have a technical issue or a challenging timeline, we can have very real engineering and operational conversations, and we solve the problem together," Dang shared. "That, for me, is why I call Lumen a partner more than just a vendor."

As the season builds toward its largest events, Netskrt is already planning for expected demand and the capacity it will need to meet it. That preparation is one reason the company continues to win some of the industry's largest streaming opportunities. "Lumen has been an indispensable partner for Netskrt," Luft said. "Adding the capacity when we really need it has given us the ability to win contracts with some of the largest customers, and to deliver some of the largest events."

To learn more about how Netskrt delivers streaming everywhere, read the full customer success story.

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_{¹Dan Rayburn, "CDN Netskrt Discloses Network Capacity, Revenue, and How it Adds Capacity Profitably," StreamingMediaBlog.com, February 18, 2026.}

_{²eMarketer, cited in Netskrt and Lumen Team Up to Power Next-Generation Live Streaming at Scale, August 21, 2025.}

_{Current Lumen customer compensated for their endorsement.}

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