The Partner communications group is preparing for the World Cup tournament and announced a significant technological upgrade designed to improve the viewing experience of live sports broadcasts. The company implemented advanced technology to reduce latency (Delay) in its new television service, Partner tv+, with the goal of bringing the broadcast to a pace as close as possible to real time. The new technology is expected to enter into gradual and automatic operation on the company’s set-top boxes by the end of the current month, and it will be deployed across all sports channels at no additional cost to customers.
The technological solution chosen is a Low Latency architecture, which was developed in cooperation with Synamedia. In existing streaming systems operating over the internet, there is a natural latency that sometimes reaches up to approximately 25 seconds compared to the original broadcast. To overcome this gap, Partner installed dedicated CDN servers at its sites. These servers significantly accelerate the content loading rate, reduce direct loads on the company’s central servers, and improve the security and availability of the broadcast even during peak moments of high data traffic.
The current preparation comes ahead of the 23rd FIFA World Cup tournament, which is scheduled to open on June 11, 2026, and will last 39 days. The tournament will take place for the first time in three countries simultaneously – United States, Mexico, and Canada – and will include 48 national teams playing across 104 matches. Concurrent with the public broadcasts on Kan 11, all tournament matches this year will also be broadcast in their entirety on the Sport 1 channels. The 'Sport 1' package on Partner includes five premium channels, which are also available for viewing on mobile devices, and its price stands at NIS 89.90 per month.
According to Eldad Feiles, Chief Technology Officer at Partner, the company invested in infrastructure and advanced technologies ahead of the world's largest sporting event to ensure a fast and smooth viewing experience. Feiles noted that the upgrade significantly reduces the latency gaps familiar in the streaming world, which will allow viewers to follow the peak moments in the matches without unnecessary delays.
The current move constitutes another layer in the Partner tv+ service that was launched at the end of 2025. The upgraded service includes an app, an updated interface, and a wider offering of content, which includes exclusive channels such as the 'Heroes' channel and the 'True Crime' channel. In total, the platform offers approximately 70 basic channels, out of which about 30 are new channels, alongside approximately 60 premium channels.
While Partner presents the current upgrade ahead of June, in the local market this is a technology that has already been tested in the past. Cellcom implemented this latency reduction technology already two years ago, during the Euro matches. At Cellcom, contrary to Partner’s current move, support for the technology is not limited only to owners of dedicated set-top boxes, but is also widely available to users of smart TV applications.