Digital transformation of major scientific meetings induced by the COVID-19 pandemic: insights from the ESC 2020 annual congress.

As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) was forced to pivot the scientific programme of the ESC Congress 2021 into a totally new format for online consumption, . A variety of new suppliers were involved, including experts in TV studio, cloud infrastructure, online platforms, video management, and online analytics. An information technology platform able to support hundreds of thousands simultaneous connections was built and cloud computing technologies were put in place to help scale up and down the resources needed for the high number of users at peak times.