Once brings real-time, data-driven interactivity to live events, productions, and platforms of any scale. They partner with media producers and news outlets to power digital experiences using Based, a scalable, live data platform, and Tally, an intuitive solution to help broadcasters empower and encourage user engagement with real-time interactions.
“‘Everyone, everywhere, all at once’ — our company motto — explains it all,” says Jim de Beer, Chief Technical Officer at Once and Founder of Based. “We focus on connecting organizations and creators to large amounts of information, people, and things, bringing in that live component that creates an endless flow of possibilities.”
Among their media clients, Once is a long-term partner of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), producers of the Eurovision Song Contest. Beginning with pan-European SMS voting in 2004, the company later pioneered live virtual cheering for Eurovision viewers during 2021’s COVID-19 lockdowns. When Eurovision opened polling to a global audience, Once connected millions of international viewers outside Europe, and then collecting, counting, and publishing votes on the fly as the live contest unfolded. Since 2024, Eurovision called upon Once to support an extended global voting window of almost 24 hours.
Once’s core challenge is ensuring real-time delivery, uninterrupted availability, and the scalability to handle massive traffic surges of limited duration. It is a daunting responsibility, particularly during the annual high-visibility, high-traffic Eurovision Song Contest where Once supports millions of concurrent user interactions across approximately 150 countries.
“Audience participation is the wild card that makes Eurovision exciting — every delay has the potential to ruin the integrity of the event,” explains de Beer. “There is only one chance to get it right, and Once takes responsibility for that.”
As the company that powers interactivity for Eurovision’s high-visibility events, online security is also a major concern for Once. De Beer explains how the urgency of maintaining a security-first focus became especially clear when a series of large-scale DDoS and botnet attacks struck the Junior Eurovision Contest and caused 30% of Once’s servers to fail.
“Using many unique IP addresses, botnets made a sophisticated strategic attempt to test our infrastructure for vulnerabilities. You can’t block that kind of attack manually, ” explains de Beer. “Feeling the heat, we knew we had to invest in rebuilding a big part of our security infrastructure.”
With political conflicts escalating in Ukraine and Northern Europe, Once and the EBU took the possibility of future attacks extremely seriously. That is when de Beer reached out to Cloudflare.
“I sent Cloudflare a message via one of their ‘Contact Us’ forms. I explained our situation, saying we had another Eurovision event coming up and that we had to secure the new global voting process from end to end,” says de Beer. “The response was very personal. I did not expect the attention of some of Cloudflare’s top people.”
Collaborating with Cloudflare to address their mounting challenges, Once upgraded and modernized their security infrastructure. The company began with Cloudflare application security and performance services to close vulnerabilities, block attacks, ensure availability, and accelerate interactions on the Based.io platform. These early changes exceeded the capabilities of their old provider, eliminating one of their most pressing pain points.