A New Production & Media Centre

DAZN is a ground-breaking live and ondemand sports streaming service, giving sports fans the control and flexibility to watch their sports, their way. Satellite dishes and cables are not required. Sports fans simply download the DAZN app and have unlimited access to watch the widest array of sports on multiple devices at home or on the go, all for an affordable monthly fee.

As one of the fastest-growing sports media companies in the world, DAZN features more than 25,000 sporting events a year and is live across four continents in key markets including the U.S., Canada, Japan, Germany and Brazil.

As perhaps one of the most exciting broadcasters in the world, DAZN's mission is to deliver the drama of sport to their subscriber base, wherever they are and to whatever device they wish. By its very nature global sport is a geographically distributed medium: networks are required from arenas and stadiums to content distribution hubs and post-production facilities, back to distribution hubs and ultimately to the screens of subscribers around the globe.

Providing this service to a demanding, mobilised, cable cutting generation requires highly optimised global network assets. The challenge DAZN was facing centred around this.

Production & Media Centre: Connectivity for global sport

As part of DAZN's expansion, they were moving to a state of the art production and media centre in the north of England to provide post-production for the largest and most prestigious sporting events across the globe. They needed a highly available network infrastructure solution to connect their facility to data centres in the south of
England with the capacity to deliver hundreds of concurrent high bit-rate video and audio channels simultaneously.

Such activity requires absolute diversity and exceptionally high bandwidth provided by a network supplier with a deep understanding of how they interconnect and play a vital role in their broadcasting service.

A traditional MPLS or equivalent carrier solution would not suffice at the required bandwidth or level of service assurance required. Therefore the architecture team determined that a low-level layer 1 ring was required. The following must be achieved;

• 100% Route Diversity between the three sites
• N+1 route availability
• Multi-directional traffic flow
• Complete logical, switching & routing segregation from non DAZN traffic
• Jumbo frames
• Protocol agnostic
• Predictable frame delivery
• Low latency
• Pro-active monitoring & Service Management
• Ability to increase bandwidth quickly and simply

The 01T architecture team conducted a duct level analysis of all available routes between the three sites to identify the optimal path to achieve all of the above. Consideration was particularly given to achieving the brief whilst utilising as few junctions and repeaters as possible. There is a tight correlation between numerical device dependency and uptime – the fewer active devices a service passes through, the less likely a service is impacted by device malfunction.

Low-level consideration was also given to building entry design and internal cable runs. All of the work that goes into external and metro path design can be undone by compromising the entry into buildings. Civil and maintenance work often occurs around the perimeter of buildings and therefore fibre assets can be vulnerable.

Finally, consultation on service segregation and hand off was conducted. Ultimately 100 Gbps of capacity was required for each leg, so the next step was deciding the most effective way of delivering this service. There was a desire to provide segregation to DAZNs many data flows and operational units. If we were to hand off the service on 100 Gbps optical interfaces, a significant investment in access and aggregation switching would have been required for DAZN. Instead, 01T were able to multiplex the service and hand off on 10×10 Gbps ports removing the need for significant hard- ware investment.

Ultimately, an extremely high performing network was delivered which provides the foundations for DAZN to launch in 200 territories throughout 2020. Such an ambitious launch schedule can only be achieved when you are certain you have absolute trust in your means of product delivery.

Three design fundamentals to this project were achieved;

Performance
Extremely high bandwidth with no performance-limiting frame buffers and policing to keep packet delivery performance stable and predictable.

Diversity
To keep each path 100% diverse from one another to ensure no points of convergence and no single points of failure.

Speed & Contention
To provide full line-rate bandwidth at a fixed low latency so that high bitrate streams can enter the mixing desk and crucially make its way back to the data centre and CDN.

To put that into context, a live soccer match in Spain can be transmitted to London, routed to a production facility for live commentary, and back to London to be sent to the world's largest CDNs for end-user delivery.

This was a hugely successful and exciting project that we were thrilled to complete with DAZN. We look forward to continuing to provide this world-leading next generation of live sports broadcasting with far-reaching solutions that are essential for their success.

• Access to huge bandwidth to support their unprecedented scaling and success.
• All network assets pro-actively monitored and maintained by a dedicated team of specialists at 01T.
• Any network issues that arise can be instantly notified by 01T, relieving DAZN reactive incident management.
• DAZN receives the same, consistent SLA and connectivity across its entire network (anywhere in the world), with assured diversity and service assurance.