Germany’s DFL taps AWS Media Services for new live streaming platform

The DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL), which is the governing body of the Bundesliga, is responsible for the organization and marketing of professional football in Germany. The Bundesliga, the soccer league with the best goals-per-game rate among Europe’s top five football leagues, is using AWS Media Services to power its new live streaming service. Using AWS Media Services, DFL can bring Bundesliga games with more flexibility and interactivity than ever to global fans, live and time-shifted within the event-stream on the IP-enabled device viewers prefer.

Taking advantage of the latest cloud-based content processing and live streaming technology, the league has implemented a cost-effective, flexible infrastructure from AWS Media Services that easily and reliably supports the DFL’s array of international broadcast rights holders, and that allows it to easily and directly reach more football fans around the world.

The DFL announced the launch of its new streaming service with the beginning of the new season on Sept. 18 with a full slate of Bundesliga live games available globally. Fully managed AWS Media Services enable DFL to automate content encoding without having to invest in new hardware or human resources. Now, with AWS and system integrator and AWS partner Logic Media, the DFL simply offers licensees a URL to receive the respective livestream.

“Limited bandwidth and fixed hardware were restricting the DFL’s ability to move quickly with the markets they want to address, the broadcasters they want to address and the way they wanted to address them,” said Rene van Koll, Solutions Architect, AWS Media Services. “With the addition of a customer-centric offer built-on AWS, they can grow the brand, support sponsors, and increase its audience.”

“Using AWS Media Services and Amazon CloudFront, distribution can be accomplished in a matter of seconds,” said van Koll. “This will not only save the DFL time, but it will also bring the league the flexibility it needs to take its live streaming efforts to the next level of two-way interactivity and greater access to the entire world.”

The streaming platform architected by DFL and Logic Media is powered by virtualized content management, processing and distribution functionality from AWS Media Services. This includes: AWS Elemental MediaLive for scalable encoding; AWS Elemental MediaConnect for smooth and secure transport of high-bandwidth mezzanine video streams; and, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, for generation of the Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) outputs required to deliver high-quality viewing experiences on multiple devices at scale and without the need to add more processing resources. It also allows DFL and Logic Media to apply digital rights management for content security across multiple outputs.

AWS Elemental MediaConnect is used in tandem with AWS Elemental MediaLive to provide the necessary inputs between the league’s stadiums across the country and its main production center in Cologne. This new workflow provides the DFL with the flexibility to perform tasks that are common but not necessarily easy in the traditional broadcast world—such as providing extra outputs of the input stream to other services, workflows, partners or even customers.

Another benefit for the DFL of using AWS Media Services is that software upgrades and system maintenance are a thing of the past. Because all of the compute power is in the cloud, there’s no need to purchase new hardware and secure additional bandwidth as the migration from HD to UHD continues. It has been replaced with the ability to spin up new services, add extra capacity and system redundancy (guaranteed reliability) at a moment’s notice. This helps avoid lengthy integration cycles that lead to costly system downtime.

Finally, all the content generated with the AWS Media Services is served out to Bundesliga licensees using Amazon CloudFront. This global content delivery network works in combination with AWS Elemental MediaPackage to bring content to the league’s customers. With the “one click” setup option for Amazon CloudFront from AWS Elemental MediaPackage, DFL and Logic Media can configure the CDN with all the appropriate settings and see results quickly, while still being able to tweak settings to their liking later for specific use cases or a spike in online user demand.

“The DFL has added a very flexible infrastructure to its international broadcast ecosystem one that allows them to react quickly to changing business models and customer demand in different parts of the world,” said van Koll. “Cloud-based operation is the future and it is happening today. Broadcasters tend to migrate this way in order to keep up with consumer demand. Fans wants immediate response and this type of cloud-based infrastructure facilitates that nicely.”