AWS for M&E Blog
DAZN streams 2025 FIFA Club World Cup to billions of fans with M2A Media and AWS
When international sports streaming service DAZN secured the global rights to the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup football tournament, it set out to deliver an unmatched live viewing experience. The event took place June 14-July 13, 2025, and included the broadcast of 63 matches, held in 12 US venues to audiences in 200 global territories, tuning in from a range of devices. Recognizing that it would need an architecture overhaul to pull off the ambitious production, DAZN turned to M2A Media (M2A) for an assist.
A longtime Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, M2A worked closely with the AWS team to scale the underlying DAZN infrastructure ahead of the event. Their combined efforts laid the groundwork for a successful live FIFA Club World Cup production and also set the stage for future live event streams on a global scale, orchestrated with M2A services.
Building on a history of innovation
M2A has collaborated with DAZN since 2016, with M2A providing the headend for the platform’s live sports streams. The relationship between M2A and AWS dates back even further, to the founding of M2A in 2016. M2A initially leveraged on-premises solutions made by Elemental Technologies, now known as AWS Elemental. They have since transitioned to cloud-based AWS Elemental Media Services, a move that enables them to provide customers with unmatched flexibility and scale.
As plans for the FIFA Club World Cup production came together, DAZN opted to more than double capacity at the service headend, which is comprised of the global distribution, direct-to-consumer, and video on-demand (VOD) offerings of M2A. They also wanted to offer multiple viewing tiers so that audiences could access higher-quality HD, and high dynamic range (HDR) event coverage with immersive Dolby audio for a subscription fee. This is in addition to watching live and on-demand coverage in full high definition (HD) on the platform for free.
For the FIFA Club World Cup, DAZN had to spin up at least 24 video channels for each match for the Freemium service, and a further 24 for Premium HDR and Dolby services. The company’s playout team then tailored all incoming feeds with localized commentary, graphics, and branding, using the Amagi cloud-based channel playout stack on AWS. They also needed to ingest, encode, package, and deliver these feeds to a massive, geographically disparate audience. Frame-accurate chopping for live streams was another crucial consideration, so that DAZN could transform live event feeds into quick turnaround VOD assets.
Orchestrating live video channels at scale
Given the high number of output renditions, executed across four AWS Regions (North Virginia, Frankfurt, Dublin, and Singapore), DAZN orchestrated 312 encoders using M2A services. This included Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)-based packager and manifest manipulation nodes in the thousands.
“When you’re orchestrating a global, live high stakes event like the FIFA Club World Cup, resilience is key,” said Andy Wilson, VP of Customer Success, M2A. “We wanted to be sure we could service each territory with the lowest latency and highest quality possible. The event’s dynamic schedule required tight collaboration with AWS and advance planning to make certain we had the resources we needed in place for encoding, packaging, and delivery. AWS Elemental Media Services and the AWS team were instrumental in helping us deliver the exceptional caliber experience our client expected.”
DAZN and M2A also had to brace for unexpected delays. During one of the semi-final matches, a weather alert stopped the game with just four minutes left on the clock, and play didn’t resume for more than two hours. In this case, DAZN was able to keep resources online until the match concluded, then quickly spun down those additional resources.
Streamlining production and media operations
In addition to providing technical services for the event, M2A managed production and media operations. To accommodate the DAZN broadcast and live streaming operations team based in Leeds, England, M2A spun up a temporary cloud-based master control room (MCR).
M2A monitored signals as they arrived in its Connect service, which orchestrates and arbitrates the contribution of M2A client broadcast feeds on top of the AWS Elemental MediaConnect service for live video transport. All incoming video feeds came in through monitoring walls using the M2A Connect Console, powered by AWS. This approach helped DAZN achieve optimal picture and audio quality, verifying that the audio commentary and effects were in proper order and landing on the designated channels in the right language. MediaConnect also enabled proxy browsing for confidence monitoring as well as alert and triage management.
“Having the ability to communicate quickly with the team to identify and solve problems was indispensable for this tournament,” shared Wilson. “AWS played an integral part in facilitating that. They provide an exceptionally high quality of service and reliability, which is crucial in this business.”
Once Connect received the feeds, it sent them to the M2A Live orchestration stack, which uses AWS Elemental MediaLive for video encoding and Live Origin from Unified Streaming, with the additional manifest manipulation layer of M2A Media, to prepare and package the feeds for secure delivery. In addition, AWS Elemental MediaPackage was used for confidence monitoring. A workflow layer that M2A built on top of the service handles complex business logic for scheduling and running the encoders and packagers applying the various configurations required to meet the specifications of each video channel.
“When you ask an encoder to perform a specific task, it must do that without error or degradation and with high quality,” explained Wilson. “AWS Elemental MediaLive is the backbone of all of our services, and nothing compares to the robust capabilities that AWS Elemental MediaConnect provides for ingest and delivery.”
Most DAZN events require a maximum of six video channels, and up to 12 channels during football season—running 48 concurrent video channels for every region for a single event was a massive change. To accommodate the increased load, the M2A team redesigned its software to accelerate signal validation. New custom tooling allowed operators to view an event channel from one surface and get all the audio configuration they needed, then quickly change channels so they could descend through all 48 channels in one region. Multiple operators were then able to switch between regions as needed.
Looking up the field
With an eye towards continued innovation, M2A is exploring artificial intelligence (AI) tools and services to help enhance signal ingest and egress confidence for clients. Its team is also experimenting with different AI models through AWS generative AI service Amazon Bedrock. It would help automate the detection of production settings and elements, such as the language spoken, if a match is active, whether the video shows a crowd or a studio environment, if the audio is surround, and more.
“Our exploration of AI is all about making processes more efficient for our clients so they can manage more channels,” concluded Wilson. “But even without AI, a lot of the optimizations we put in place for the FIFA Club World Cup are benefitting other customers. We made some seemingly impossible asks to AWS for DAZN, many that required complex coding, but the AWS team made it all happen. It’s been an amazing partnership that continues to pay dividends.”
Learn more about AWS Elemental Media Services, or get in touch with an AWS for Media & Entertainment representative.