A few months have passed since Spain lifted the 2026 World Cup trophy, but the tournament gave us plenty to remember - from a star-studded halftime show and divisive water breaks to, not least, England’s best World Cup finish since 1966.
Yet the story extended beyond what was happening on the pitch. This year’s tournament showed how the experience of watching live sport has changed, and how quickly audience expectations are moving with it.
For digital sports broadcasters, simply delivering the game reliably is no longer the whole job. Fans increasingly expect a richer experience around the live action. The 2026 World Cup demonstrated what is possible when the digital experience is treated as part of the event itself - and what that could mean for audience engagement, loyalty, and growth.
In this blog, we look at how ITV approached this challenge and the lessons its coverage offers broadcasters thinking about the next generation of live sports streaming.
The ITVX Fan Zone Experience
To support ITV’s coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, ITV partnered with Candyspace and Monterosa to turn ITVX into an interactive live sports destination across mobile and connected TV. Rather than treating the digital experience as a secondary screen, Candyspace helped to build the World Cup Companion directly into the ITVX platform, with native development across iOS, Android and tvOS.
The aim was simple: give fans more ways to engage with the tournament without taking them away from the live action. The Fan Zone brought together real-time highlights, quizzes and Google Gemini-powered match insights, alongside showing more than 50 live games. Features including Apple and Google social authentication, ‘Add to My List’ and ‘Remind Me’ also made it easier for viewers to log in, find, save and return to content.
Together, these features helped ITVX deliver live coverage at scale while creating more opportunities to deepen engagement, capture first-party data and encourage viewers to explore more of the platform.
Technical Innovation and Craft
For a six-week live event of this scale, the underlying technology needed to perform reliably through sustained high concurrency and unpredictable demand, while keeping the experience simple for the viewer.
This meant building interactivity directly into the native ITVX experience, enabling live polls, player ratings and predictions alongside the match, while also creating new opportunities for contextual advertising and sponsorship.
AI added another layer of context, with Google Gemini powering match overviews and tactical insights. On iOS, picture-in-picture allowed viewers to browse team line-ups, Opta statistics and tournament news without interrupting the live stream.
There was also a focus on reducing friction. Apple and Google social authentication simplified registration, while ‘Remind Me’, ‘Add to My List’, Promo Rails and player recommendations helped audiences move naturally between live events and the wider ITVX catalogue.
Crucially, all of this had to work at World Cup scale. Playback, buffering and DRM were optimised to maintain a reliable experience through sustained concurrency and unpredictable peaks in demand.
This project built on more than 15 years of collaboration between Candyspace and ITV, with a shared understanding of its products, audiences and the demands of live broadcasting.
Impact and Results
The 2026 World Cup features delivered exceptional engagement and commercial outcomes for ITVX:
- Record engagement: ITVX recorded more than 436 million streams in July 2026 - its most successful month on record. The tournament itself generated more than 200 million streams, making it the most-watched sporting event in ITVX history.
- High-scale live viewing: ITVX handled nearly 5 million peak live streams during the England vs Norway match - a 38% increase on the 2024 Euros - while maintaining a reliable viewing experience.
- DTC account growth: Nearly 1.5 million social logins were recorded since late May, with daily sign-ins peaking at 320,000, demonstrating the role that simpler authentication can play in growing registered audiences.
- User retention: Features such as Live & Fast Player Recommendations and ‘Add to My List’ helped connect sports audiences with the wider ITVX catalogue, generating more than 100 million onward streams from sports into Reality and Drama content.
The results demonstrate that a major live sporting event can do more than drive viewing. Done well, it can also create new opportunities to grow registered audiences, deepen engagement and move viewers further into a broadcaster’s wider DTC/audience ecosystem.
“Candyspace has provided a consistently excellent standard of service to ITV for over a decade and has been integral to the success of ITVX. The quality of the talent they deploy has always been very high.”
— Steve Forde, Director of Product, ITV
How we did it
We spoke to ITV’s Director of Product, Steve Forde, about how the business delivered a successful World Cup on ITVX.
From cost centre to growth engine: the 30-million hour test
"We created a long-term holdout group to demonstrate that our product developments—not just the content itself—were driving real business growth. We held 2% of our audience back from receiving product updates for six months while keeping content, marketing, and everything else identical to the remaining 98%.
Across that period, we saw increases in user frequency, conversion to view, and overall streaming hours, generating over 30 million additional streaming hours. To put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of commissioning a massive Saturday night entertainment show like Britain's Got Talent, but delivered at a fraction of the cost through product improvements. It fundamentally shifted internal discussions across ITV, moving Product from a perceived cost centre to a demonstrable growth engine."
Shifting from feature wishlists to viewer journeys
"Transitioning from the launch phase of ITVX into a growth phase meant reorganising our teams around viewer journeys rather than feature lists. At one point post-launch, we had a 500-item wishlist from across the business causing friction and debate, so we created dedicated squads focussed on end-to-end user journeys and clear growth metrics.
This structure empowered teams to hunt down specific friction points for viewers—like removing passwords entirely in favour of social sign-in and magic links. As a result, we saw around 45% of sign-ins go through those new mechanisms and received zero password-related support queries during the World Cup. By focussing on the full viewer journey, our squads solved real user friction while building features that deliver lasting value long after the tournament ends."
Designing for double the scale across the entire ecosystem
"During the Qatar 2022 World Cup when ITVX first launched, our live concurrent streams peaked at 2.4 million viewers for England versus France. In this latest World Cup, we saw those concurrents double to 4.8 million—reflecting the rapid growth of IP-only homes over the last four years.
Delivering for an audience that size is a massive engineering challenge, but it goes far beyond just video delivery. While streaming the match is core, you have to scale the entire platform ecosystem to match. Nearly every single viewer passes through the homepage, so personalisation engines, ad insertion pipelines, and load balancing across multi-CDN partners all have to perform flawlessly under extreme pressure to ensure a seamless experience."
About Candyspace
Candyspace is a Quantiphi company. We combine award-winning, human-centred design and engineering with Quantiphi's global leadership in generative, conversational and agentic AI. We work across the leading enterprise platforms Optimizely, Contentful, StoryBlok and Commercetools and are trusted to deliver by some of the world's best-known brands, including ITV, Rolls-Royce, Mazda, The Royal Mint, Samsung, MS Now, Mars, and Interflora.
Together, Candyspace and Quantiphi help organisations create digital platforms that are technically robust, commercially focused and capable of supporting the next generation of intelligent, adaptive customer experiences.
Ready to take your organisation’s digital experiences to the next level? Get in touch for a call with one of our product experts.
