About FuboTV

FuboTV is a sports-first live TV streaming platform delivering premium content across sports, news, and entertainment. Accessible via SmartTVs, mobile, and web, the service continues to grow rapidly, reaching $1.45 billion in revenue in early 2024. With a business model driven by both subscriptions and advertising, FuboTV relies heavily on real-time data to personalize ads, optimize delivery, and maximize revenue.

Challenge

Real-time performance for every ad break, every viewer

To deliver dynamic, personalized ads during live programming, FuboTV integrates Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) with data-driven decisioning. But as usage grew, its ad tech systems faced increasing pressure.

  • User data access under heavy load

    Ad personalization required real-time access to user profiles, but Redis struggled to meet performance needs at peak volumes.

  • Frequency capping at scale

    FuboTV needed to ensure users didn’t see the same ad too often, requiring accurate per-user tracking in real time without increasing latency.

  • Traffic balancing across ad servers

    Serving ads from third-party sources introduced variability. FuboTV needed to allocate traffic intelligently and avoid overloading any single endpoint.

  • High-speed counters for real-time tracking

    Accurate, low-latency tracking of ad delivery and impressions was essential to meet advertiser obligations and power analytics—but existing systems couldn’t keep up.

Solution

Enabling fast, personalized streaming experiences with Aerospike

FuboTV turned to Aerospike to support the performance and scale required for its growing ad tech operations. By moving key components of its infrastructure—including parts of its user profile store—from Redis to Aerospike, the team achieved consistently low latency and higher throughput during live events and peak traffic windows.

  • Real-time user profile store

    FuboTV powers real-time lookups that enrich ad requests with user data using Aerospike. This upgrade improved ad targeting performance and ensured consistently low latency, even during peak viewing periods

  • Low-latency frequency capping

    FuboTV uses counters stored in Aerospike to manage how often ads are shown to individual users. Aerospike’s high throughput and sub-millisecond response times enable these decisions to happen in real time, without slowing down the stream.

  • Smarter traffic allocation across ad servers

    During live programming, FuboTV routes ad traffic to third-party content providers. Backed by Aerospike’s predictable performance, the system dynamically balances traffic to avoid overloading any single partner, even under intense viewer demand.

  • Real-time tracking of ad delivery

    FuboTV tracks ad impressions and delivery metrics to meet advertiser requirements and optimize revenue. Aerospike provides the speed and scale needed to store and retrieve this tracking data instantly, supporting real-time reporting across millions of users.

Results

Real-time ad decisioning with consistent low latency

By deploying Aerospike on Google Cloud, FuboTV improved performance across key ad tech operations—ad personalization, delivery tracking, and server routing—while preparing for future scale.

Aerospike helps FuboTV deliver high-performance ad-supported streaming while supporting its growth in a highly competitive market.

  • Sub-millisecond latency

    Delivers fast reads and writes for user profile lookups, counters, and ad tracking—critical for real-time ad decisions.

  • Millions of operations per second

    Handles peak streaming traffic with high throughput, supporting ad personalization and monetization at scale.

  • Improved ad targeting

    Enables real-time enrichment of ad requests with user data, driving better engagement and higher relevance.

  • Smarter ad traffic distribution

    Supports dynamic routing across third-party ad servers, preventing overloads during major live events.

  • Real-time delivery tracking

    Powers impression-level tracking to meet advertiser requirements and maximize revenue.