Sports Video Group Europe
DAZN, the live and on-demand sport service, has only been
running 14 months since exploding onto the scene in Germany, Austria,
Switzerland and Japan. The UK-based streaming division of Perform Group has
made big strides from newcomer to big player in the market in that time
experiencing significant success in Japan and some hiccups in rolling out its
service into Canada.
While DAZN’s subscription model is similar to
Netflix’s, the all important live element of sport makes what it is delivering
a whole lot more complex. In the past year DAZN have shown over 20
million hours of content.
“Our aim was to establish DAZN in two key but very
different markets – ultimately we wanted to prove the business model,” James
Rushton, CEO of DAZN tells Sports Video Group Europe. “We’re very
happy with how both our launch markets are tracking.”
Along with healthy subscriptions in Japan, DAZN has
actually grown attendances for the J.League in Japan, won top rights including
the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League in Germany, Austria and Japan
from the 2018/19 season, and exclusively aired the biggest sporting event of
the year – Mayweather vs McGregor – in three of its territories.
“On a global basis we have added resilience at multiple
points,” says Rushton. “We have added a new data centre point of presence in
Hong Kong creating an additional link between our Japanese production facility
and the Perform Sport Cloud to provide further resilience across our
distribution network.”
In production, it launched the live multi-screen produced
service J.League Zone, a first for the market. This service allows viewers to
follow the biggest games of the day with DAZN editors focusing in on
the key moments.
It has also built a brand new production facility in Leeds
to support English language output with multiple editing stations, two
galleries and live voiceover facilities. Alongside this, there’s a brand new
PCR, MCR and playout facility to accommodate the increasing live event output.
The portal will show all 205 games of the UEFA Europa League
live in Germany and Austria in the next three seasons. 190 of them will be
streamed exclusively, 15 matches will be screened in parallel by a free-to-air
TV partner. DAZN will also screen games of the UEFA Champions League
from the 2018/19 season. after Perform Group sublicensed the rights from Sky
Deutschland
“In Munich, we commissioned a new fast production facility
to support the tight deadlines to turn around our exclusive Bundesliga
highlights package – 40 minutes after the final whistle – which we have been
broadcasting since the opening week of the season,” says Rushton.
Boosting the J.League performance
The J.League
is the cornerstone of DAZN’s content offering in Japan. Rushton claims
that more people have viewed J.League in DAZN’s first year than (previous
incumbent, satellite broadcaster) Sky Perfect had at its peak. It has shown
live 20 J.League matches concurrently and regularly deliver in excess of 40
live concurrent events across all of its markets.
“We are showing every single game from all three divisions
(J1, J2 and J3) live for the first time and have increased the number and
position of cameras and microphones in stadium to make sure fans don’t miss a
moment of the action as well as reaction,” says Rushton.
J1 increased from 6 cameras to 9, J2 increased from 4
cameras to 6 and J3 increased from 0 cameras to 3 per game. DAZN also
created Sunday J Prime, a showcase fixture that has 16 cameras at the stadium,
and the J.League Zone, a programme that covers multiple games simultaneously.
“Our aim is the bring the level of production of the
J.League up to the standards of European football,” says Rushton. “Overall,
stadium attendances have increased and thanks to our improved content output
fan engagement around the clubs, the league and DAZN has also
increased. We will continue to evolve the opportunities around programming,
both on and off our platform and through our partnership with NTT Group we will
be improving connectivity in more stadia.”
The Smart Stadium Project is being rolled out with NTT
across Japan. Wi-Fi is being installed in Yurtec Stadium Sendai and Kashima
Soccer Stadium, with Nack 5 Stadium Omiya already installed. More stadiums will
be announced shortly. The J.League has also developed an app which enables fans
to watch the game and DAZN preview show at the stadium.
Canadian rollout challenges
Matters haven’t been as smooth in Canada, where the DAZN service
launch in September of exclusive rights to the NFL was afflicted by delayed
feeds, bad audio and service skipping. Rushton had to extend an apology to
subscribers and offer compensation, although DAZN is far from the
only live streamer suffering from Net glitches.
“Live streaming is dependent on multiple factors and they
can vary drastically from one home to another, and from one country to
another,” he says. “This makes it very complex to deliver exactly the same
experience to everyone 100% of the time. There are different internet
environments in each home, as well as a vast array of devices being used. It’s
a challenge we relish. With the challenge comes huge consumer benefits; we
don’t have a legacy business to protect or the infrastructure to pay for. Of
course, we don’t have the limitations of linear broadcasting either so we can
bring consumers a whole lot more content at a far more affordable price and
make it accessible across a wide range of devices.
“We are, and no doubt other OTT services are, always
optimising our service and devices to make improvements. We’ve already seen
vast improvements and picture quality that rivals linear broadcast. This will
continue to improve as more companies move into the streaming space, pushing
advancements and technology further.”
The lag between social media and the live stream (where
social media tweets beat that of the video stream) is a bugbear of all live
sports streamers.
“It’s one of the bigger challenges we face as we know how
frustrating it is to find out something about the game before you see it
happen,” admits Rushton. “With all forms of broadcast there will always be an
element of latency, the challenge facing ourselves and other OTT providers is
to bring this as close to, and eventually better, the latency experienced in
traditional cable and satellite delivery.
“We are working with our CDN partners, ingest companies and
platform providers to reduce this step by step. We have already reduced our
latency significantly since launch, and are testing and evaluating how we can
roll out improvements across our wide range of clients.”
The imminent entry of deep pocketed internet only players
like Amazon, Facebook and Twitter in bidding for premium live sports is a
vindication for Perform Group’s launch of DAZN, he says.
Ambitious growth plans
“For us, having more providers come into the market shows
that what we’re doing is answering a definite consumer need and expands the
market,” says Rushton. “There’s no denying that this is the future of
sports. We’ve learnt a hell of a lot over the past year and having
successfully delivered key events such as Mayweather vs. McGregor and having
secured key rights shows that we’re ahead of the game.”
“We share ambitious global growth plans and will launch new
markets. As we continue to grow all of our operations will also scale
up.”
There is opinion in the wider SVOD market that consumers are
not getting value for money or the best experience with such a fragmented array
of apps and service with which to watch the content they love. The argument
continues that after fragmentation the market will re-aggregate to one or two
super aggregator services – a Netflix, a Spotify, an Amazon or a pay-TV
operator perhaps.
“I have no doubt that more services will launch and develop,
and not just across sport but the whole broadcast market. There may come a time
where there’s simply too much choice for consumers and they’d rather have one
or two services where they can watch everything. This is something we’ll keep a
close eye on so we are able to adapt appropriately.”
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