DAZN Delivers Live Soccer to Bettors With LTN’s Channel Creation, Playout

DAZN studio
DAZN uses solutions from LTN to livestream soccer coverage and content to more than 1,000 betting locations with the low latency required by sports bettors. (Image credit: DAZN)

MUNICHDAZN is one of the largest, fastest-growing sports streaming services globally, serving over 300 million viewers across 200 markets and delivering 86,000 live events last year. We provide audiences across multiple continents, including North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania, with a wide variety of international live sports coverage—including soccer, boxing, motorsports, martial arts, golf, unmissable action from the NFL, UEFA Champions League and Europa League, and a range of premier women’s sports. Our mission is to deliver as much live sports as possible to global viewers, including one particularly fast-growing audience group: the sports betting community.

We’ve worked with LTN for several years, harnessing the LTN Lift solution to flexibly spin up and manage unique versions of our core linear channels to support days with many concurrent matches, delivered at low latency to third-party betting platforms via LTN’s managed, multicast global IP network.

Betting on Streaming
Today, we use LTN to bring a broader range of live coverage of Europe’s most popular soccer competition to wagering audiences and partner platforms across Germany. With a suite of LTN’s automated linear channel creation and playout technologies, we create and deliver a flexible portfolio of 11 low-latency, livestreaming channel variants to over 1,000 betting locations.

Starting last fall, we began delivering an additional pop-up offering with up to eight concurrent European elite soccer competitions to distribution partners—along with a range of matches from top European soccer leagues. One of our core requirements was latency—the processing and channel-creation latency from when we acquire content until it hits our clients’ platforms needs to be as low as possible. This is especially important when channel-creation playlists include live elements, because in-play wagering involves incredibly demanding streaming requirements.

Fans enjoying the game from their local betting shops need to know their stream is as close to real time as possible. LTN satisfied that requirement by offering very low latency from ingest to playout processing and distribution. LTN Lift is a user-friendly, easy-to-use solution that helps us spin up new linear feeds on the fly and integrate both live and file-based content into a linear channel experience when required.

We also didn’t want to have to build an additional facility to manage these pop-up channels. We can operate these channels from the production suites in our facility, at home or anywhere from our laptops. As a hosted cloud solution, it’s super flexible and that means we don’t have to worry about additional hardware or maintenance requirements. Having a light-touch solution where we can spin up and operate channels only when required is key for us.

While we enjoy the agile software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, we also know that our workflows are backed by LTN’s ultra-reliable IP network, which is a big plus. The monitoring, transparency and support levels are really strong. We trust the underlying technology foundations and we know LTN’s team is there whenever we need them.

Low-Latency Bets
After creating our new playout instances and managing our game day live-channel portfolio, we deliver them at low latency to distribution platform provider iGameMedia, which acquires and delivers streams at ultralow latency to betting outlets across the region.

Meanwhile, LTN helps us manage complex residential and commercial rights agreements and blackout requirements while delivering a number of concurrent live feeds to subscribers on one of the world’s leading streaming platforms.

Plugging into an intelligent IP ecosystem like LTN means we can scale and bring together complex signal acquisition, routing and distribution capabilities, helping us receive produced feeds from partner broadcasters and tailor distribution for multiple downstream partner platforms. We’re big believers in scalable, IP-first technology foundations—and we’re looking forward to driving future growth across new markets and specialized audience groups.

For more information, visit ltnglobal.com.

CATEGORIES
Head of Linear Channel, DAZN

Bernd Brunner is the head of linear channel at sports streaming platform DAZN.