Te Matatini means, ‘the many faces’ in Te Reo Māori. It is a significant cultural festival and the pinnacle event for Māori performing arts. Held every two years, it is one of the most highly anticipated events for performers, their whānau and the masses of passionate Kapa Haka fans throughout the world.

Based on experience from previous events, Māori Television were expecting a significant increase in demand on its website compared to normal day to day activity. In preparation and throughout the event, they scaled substantially the size of their infrastructure on the Catalyst Cloud. Once the last rōpū had left and the poi were packed away, they went back to their infrastructure baseline and celebrated the delivery of a very successful event.

It’s our privilege to help bring Te Matatini to even more people via the Māori TV website.

The challenge

Māori TV had previously live streamed Te Matatini in 2015, and based on that experience, they knew they were going to need significant additional capacity, for a short period of time, to meet the demand from their many eager viewers.

The solution

We helped Māori Television to plan, set up, test and implement a complete solution on the Catalyst Cloud.

Māori Television’s digital team had an idea of the expected increase in demand on the website caused by the event. Catalyst IT helped Māori Television to estimate the capacity, scale their cloud infrastructure and load test the website to match this estimate.

For the duration of the event, Catalyst had people on standby, capable of supporting Māori Television with any unexpected challenges that could come up. Cloud infrastructure had to be scaled out again as demand easily met, then far exceeded, the original estimates.

The results

Leveraging the elasticity and automation of the Catalyst Cloud, we helped Māori TV stream Te Matatini to their audience all over the world, and the website handled the load seamlessly.