JPEG XS at the Heart of the 2026 FIFA World Cup

16.06.26 11:52 AM
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will not only be played on the field. It will also be played across networks, control rooms, and technologies capable of delivering the emotion of live content at a continental scale.

This is where JPEG XS truly comes into its own. This compression standard addresses a fundamental challenge in modern live production: transporting ultra-high-quality video streams with minimal latency within IP workflows based on SMPTE ST 2110.

A continental-scale production challenge

For the first time, the FIFA World Cup spans three countries — the United States, Canada, and Mexico — across 16 host cities. Managing the broadcast infrastructure at this scale requires a fundamentally different architecture from previous editions.


Host Broadcast Services (HBS) has centralised its core operations at the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) located at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas. From there, video and audio feeds are routed to and from all 16 stadium venues, as well as to a dedicated post-production hub in London — all over a backbone network built on ST 2110 with JPEG XS compression.

According to Christophe Barbe, Head of Broadcast Infrastructure at HBS, the choice of JPEG XS was a natural one — both for its low-latency performance and because it is the reference compression standard for ST 2110. (Source: TVBEurope)

Why JPEG XS is the right answer

JPEG XS reduces bandwidth requirements while maintaining visually lossless quality and ultra-low latency. In a deployment where video must travel between stadiums hundreds of kilometers apart, through a centralised IBC, and across the Atlantic to a post-production facility, every millisecond of latency matters — and so does every megabit of bandwidth.


The technology was already tested by HBS during the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, held in the United States. That trial validated the end-to-end workflow, enabling HBS to deploy JPEG XS with confidence at the much larger scale of the 2026 World Cup.

"Seeing JPEG XS contribute to the production infrastructure of the 2026 FIFA World Cup reflects the mission we pursue at intoPIX: making live images easier to transport, faster to produce, and ever closer to the moment they happen." - Gael Rouvroy, CEO and  Director of Technology at intoPIX.

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