Join Tim Sheridan, Director of Product & Technology at Seven West Media, as he shares how Seven is leveraging cloud and AI to maximise the return on their most valuable asset — premium live content. With marquee events like the AFL Grand Final and The Ashes cricket series, the stakes couldn't be higher: massive concurrent audiences, critical advertising revenue, and zero tolerance for failure. Tim shares how they leaned on AI-powered developer and business tools to accelerate delivery, de-risk high-profile events, and maximise the return on its premium content investments. Discover how Seven's team transformed their approach to innovation — using cloud-native architecture and AI to achieve speed to market, audience experience, and advertising revenue.
What this session is about
Playbook
Editorial commentary · what to actually do about this on Monday
The concept
AFL Grand Final, The Ashes — massive concurrent streaming, zero failure tolerance. AI-powered dev tools accelerated delivery.
Why it matters
Premium live content is high-stakes; failure is brand-damaging. The patterns generalise to any high-stakes peak event.
The hard parts
Burst capacity for concurrent peak (millions watching the same moment). Cost optimisation vs. headroom is a constant tension.
Playbook moves
(1) Pre-event load tests at 1.5× expected peak. (2) Have rollback ready. (3) Keep AI tools out of the critical path until proven; use them for build-time, not run-time, on first deployments.
The surprise
The hardest part of premium live streaming isn't streaming — it's the *ad insertion* at peak. Ad systems break first under burst load. Test those harder than the video pipeline; that's the actual fragile part.
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Independent editorial perspective — not an official AWS or speaker statement. Designed for executives evaluating what to brief their teams on next.