M2A Media has worked with DAZN for over eight years, serving as the primary headend for the global sports streamer’s live-streamed content, crafting a fully cloud-based architecture that orchestrates thousands of complex live events every week.
Delivering live streams to millions of subscribers involves managing thousands of concurrent workflows, which, due to the dynamic nature of live events often necessitates handling various frame rates, codecs, and numerous other factors.
M2A’s distribution platform M2A Connect has scaled up with DAZN as the streaming service as grown and secured the rights to Formula 1, boxing and this summer’s FIFA Club World Cup.
The latter involves 32 teams playing 63 matches in 12 stadiums across 11 host cities in four weeks. It is the first time DAZN has been awarded the rights to deliver all games globally, and M2A is at the heart of the action.
“For DAZN, M2A has scaled the orchestration of its cloud distribution services in order to meet the anticipated massive scale for the biggest global sporting event of 2025,” states M2A Media CEO Ciaran Doran. “With our partner AWS, M2A has been able to exploit its global reach to ensure the security of delivery.”
For a major event like the FIFA Club World Cup, security and reliability are just as important as scalability. Doran states that the best way to combat piracy is the old adage of “defence in depth”.
“Make sure all aspects of your service are secure by default. Use content encryption everywhere, with robust authentication and authorisation for sessions, and heartbeats to limit session concurrency. Keep sessions limited to specific geographies,” he advises.
“While it is not possible/practical to curtail all sources of piracy, making use of session-based forensic watermarking to identify leaks means you can quickly shut down the sources of leaks.”
M2A Media is providing DAZN with not just the architecture for scale but also the media operations team that runs the distribution service for the streamer. “Making sure everything spins up (and down), at the right time, with the right configuration and in the right place when there are thousands of instances required for multiple, complex, concurrent workflows, is imperative and that’s exactly what M2A Media specialises in,” adds Doran.
Over the course of this year’s event, M2A is spinning up nearly 100,000 instances as well as configuring, verifying, monitoring and terminating them once the match reaches full time. The company has a network of “follow-the-sun” MCR facilities in Asia, London and West Coast USA. “We’ve embedded a temporary MCR facility within DAZN to ensure communications are tight throughout the championship and have direct access to the excellent support services from AWS.”
Using IP and the cloud is still relatively new for major sports events with broadcasters and streamers always a little slow to adopt new technologies.But, according to Doran, DAZN’s decision to employ the cloud is helping the streamer as it brings more sub-licencees on board. “If we are called upon to spin up a new channel, expand a live event’s reach to new territories, or create a new workflow to deliver a late change to another broadcaster then we can do this in minutes in the cloud,” he explains.
“Physical provisioning is typically an expensive, time-consuming, and rigid process, whereas cloud allows us to go global instantly by ‘one button’ enablement of new cloud regions, even while an event is running.”
M2A Media has used the FIFA Club World Cup to launch two completely new head-end instances in two additional geographic locations to deliver games to the global audience. “This included routing content over the AWS backbone, which we were able to undertake in very short timescales. There is the option to ‘spin down’ this infrastructure after the tournament if so required. This is something that is completely impractical and not cost-effective with on-premises equipment and fibre routes.”
