DAZN Powers Live Chats for Millions of Sports Fans with PubNub on AWS

DAZN is a leading digital sports entertainment platform available globally with nine core markets: Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Japan, Canada, the US, and the UK. Unlike traditional linear channels, DAZN offers its subscribers the option to watch with friends and influencers through watch rooms. To enhance the functionality of its watch rooms, DAZN needed to achieve the minimum latency possible, with no concurrency or channel limits. DAZN engaged AWS Partner PubNub to develop a live chat solution that would power its chat and notification features.

DAZN is known worldwide for live streaming premium sporting events, including some of the most popular competitions in the world, such as the German Bundesliga, English Premier League, Japanese J. League, LaLiga (Spain), and Serie A (Italy). As its customer base expanded, DAZN needed to scale its operations to support potentially millions of users in its Watch Party and Watch2Gether rooms. To make the chat and interaction on its platform as true to life as possible, DAZN sought to support real-time notification of chat entry and activities, as well as features like polls and quizzes. But powering an optimal customer experience at scale meant achieving the lowest latency possible for its platform and connected devices. For this, DAZN onboarded PubNub, a partner in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program.

When onboarding the PubNub solution, DAZN experienced a streamlined, collaborative process. Arnon Shmuely, director and head of professional services and cloud operation at DAZN, elaborates on the power of this partnership for users, “It is a pleasure to work with PubNub. We get fast feedback for all our requests.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and solutions supported the PubNub Developer Platform in several ways. As a company built on AWS, PubNub worked hand-in-hand with the AWS infrastructure that DAZN runs. With both PubNub and DAZN running on AWS, the latency got even shorter because the communication stays in the same network. The result is a more integrated experience for DAZN. Customers can seamlessly interact through a Watch Party, ultimately staying on the screen for longer and inviting other friends to join. Everyone can chat on the same DAZN platform, as opposed to going through another mobile app while watching the game.

The PubNub solution uses multiple AWS services, including Network Load Balancer, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon DynamoDB.

Before implementing PubNub, if too many chat messages flowed through the DAZN platform at one time, some could be lost to the end user. Now, the platform enables sub-100 millisecond latency with 99.999% uptime, allowing chat message visibility to be customized to the user’s reading speed and interests. Shmuely shares more, “It has to be reliable, close to zero latency, and this is why we chose PubNub. They're leading in this area.” Using PubNub’s In-App Messaging feature, DAZN can power customizable and reliable chat and Watch Party experiences for 10 million users.

The PubNub In-App Messaging solution also supports an enhanced user experience for those who are engaging with the DAZN platform from their mobile devices. The platform successfully supported 130 million connected devices in 2022.

With a plan to expand in Japan, the multi-region capacities supported by the PubNub In-App Messaging solution have enabled DAZN to accelerate its global growth. Now the company can optimize its cost efficiency, scalability, and time to market. To continue to power its real-time engagement platform for customers around the world, DAZN looks forward to continuing its partnership with PubNub.