Host Broadcast Services (HBS) ran the most ambitious production operation in the tournament’s history: a 48-team field, matches split across three countries, and a production model that moved content across the Atlantic in real time. Inside that operation, TVU Networks detailed its role as the production backbone behind Match Buddy, the new alternative live-stream format HBS built for the tournament, and the architecture that kept it running for all five media partners from the Opening Match to the Final.
To operate at that scale, HBS split its production between host-city crews in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Coordinating that footprint took 16 match directors across 16 venues over the 39 days between the Opening Match and the Final, with 104 matches played from a 48-team field, HBS’s biggest to date.
Match Buddy gives media partners a mosaic of live video feeds and real-time match data in a single, customisable stream for fans who want more than a traditional match feed. Each of HBS’s media partners could select a team view: Team A, Team B, or Versus; one of four graphic templates ranging from a single data-rich feed to a four-camera “Complete” layout, and either FIFA’s visual identity or their own branding, all layered with data such as possession, distance covered, and pass accuracy.
To deliver that experience reliably for every match, HBS turned to TVU Networks for the production layer underneath it. TVU built Match Buddy as a modular, self-serve service, closer to a set of building blocks than a single fixed product. Each media partner assembles its own combination match by match: a camera-feed composition, a graphic template, a team view, a branding layer — and a dedicated set of TVU APIs snaps those pieces together automatically at the moment of deployment, for all five media partners at once, instead of HBS or TVU configuring each one by hand.
That same modularity let the service scale elastically and stay reliable throughout the tournament. Pre-configured TVU Producer instances hosted in different regions, a primary and a backup always live, kept Match Buddy continuously on air, whichever region was handling a match, while TVU’s remote-commentary connectivity fed the producer workflow underneath it all.
“Working with HBS on Match Buddy wasn’t a hand-off; it was built alongside their team from day one,” said Fernando Pinto Jez, VP of Product & Solutions Strategy at TVU Networks. “They pushed us on how partners would actually use it and what had to hold up under live conditions, and that back-and-forth is what shaped the final product. It’s the kind of partnership we’d want on every project. “
“Reliability wasn’t optional for a service running across every match of the tournament, for five media partners at the same time,” said Johannes Franken, Director of Digital at Host Broadcast Services. “Working with TVU, we built Match Buddy on an architecture that could fail over automatically without a producer having to react — that let us focus on the product experience instead of the plumbing.”
HBS has treated the 2026 tournament as much a proving ground for its remote-hub model as a broadcast, a chance to weigh, after the fact, where splitting live and non-live work across the Atlantic saved time and where it didn’t, ahead of future large-scale events. Match Buddy’s architecture, and the redundancy TVU built into it, will be part of that review.
Join TVU Networks at the upcoming Broadcasters Convention – Southern Africa 2026, taking place from 22–25 October 2026 at Avani+ Barbarons, Mahé, Seychelles, convened by Broadcast Media Africa (BMA) in partnership with the Southern Africa Broadcasting Association (SABA) and hosted by the Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation (SBC).
