Partner Success with AWS / Media & Entertainment / Germany
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Dyn Media Launches to Millions of Sports Fans in One Year with AWS and Stripe
To minimize disruption, scale easily, and offer an excellent customer experience, Dyn Media built its streaming platform on AWS and implemented Stripe for seamless, secure subscription management.
12
months to build a ready-to-launch platform
99.999%
uptime for payments processing by implementing Stripe
Target
group of 17 million viewers supported by Stripe and AWS services
Overview
Germany-based Dyn Media wanted to bring more choice to sports fans in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. After acquiring the media rights to broadcast high-profile leagues, Dyn Media had one year to create a new, subscription-based, stream-ready platform. To do this—and launch smoothly—Dyn Media needed a reliable cloud platform and a robust subscription management service. By building on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and implementing solutions from AWS Partner Stripe to manage payment and billing, Dyn Media was able to scale subscribers, sell subscriptions, and manage payment as well as billing—all while providing an excellent customer experience.
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Opportunity | Building a Streaming Service That Can Compete in the Market
Dyn Media entered the sports streaming industry in Germany with the goal of providing comprehensive coverage of emerging sports, including handball, basketball, volleyball, hockey, and table tennis. Created through a joint venture between former German Football League CEO Christian Seifert and media giant Axel Springer, the company had one year to build and launch a robust, scalable, and high-quality streaming platform from the ground up for the upcoming seasons.
To achieve this, Dyn Media prioritized minimizing hardware by utilizing cloud and remote workflows, adopting seamless cloud integration, ensuring event-driven scalability, and supporting massive live video transport across thousands of scheduled games. These factors would enable the three main areas of Dyn Media’s service: a content desk where content is uploaded and downloaded; over-the-top (OTT) content delivery; and subscription, payment, and billing management. To fulfill rapid development, process and store large volumes of near real-time data, and manage subscriptions smoothly, the company explored services that would ensure high performance, scalability, and minimal downtime.
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Stripe’s services helped us give customers more choice and allowed us to create other consumption models for fans.”
Andreas Heyden
CEO, Dyn Media
Solution | Emphasizing Uptime, Capacity, and Easy Integration
With the expectation of broadcasting more than 2,500 games in its first season, Dyn Media wanted to feel confident it could scale its video platform without interrupting service. After five years of proven success working with AWS, DYN Media's leadership chose to build the infrastructure for its sport streaming service on AWS. “AWS provides a breadth and depth of solutions that gives us the flexibility to develop new features while meeting the dynamic demands of live sports streaming,” said Andreas Heyden, chief executive officer of Dyn Media.
To monetize its content, Dyn Media worked with Stripe, an AWS Partner that provides a cloud-based, fully PCI-compliant, and scalable payment infrastructure platform. “We saw that the flexibility Stripe could offer us, paired with its technical stability, would help power the great experience we wanted customers to associate with our brand,” said Fabian Dressen, technical lead at Dyn Media.
To build trust with customers, Dyn Media made the business decision to introduce a presales phase, allowing customers to register and subscribe before the start of the service and the launch of the applications. The billing, however, only took place once Dyn Media started to offer its service. This resulted in a need for a scalable, backend infrastructure that could handle a high amount of concurrent payment executions, as well as a payment and subscription partner that could support a high volume of requests per second (RPS). With Stripe and the serverless compute service of AWS Lambda, Dyn Media found the best match for its needs while enabling a smooth customer experience.
“The reliability of AWS gives us back the time we’d otherwise spend on ensuring servers are up and running,” said Heyden. “That is more time we can commit to creating great experiences for our customers.”
To power its subscriptions, Dyn Media chose Stripe Billing, which allows the team to manage subscriptions dynamically and enable recurring billing. Stripe Payments lets Dyn Media accept payments online from customers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. “Stripe’s services helped us give our customers more choice and allowed us to create other consumption models for fans beyond our monthly and annual subscription options,” said Heyden.
Additionally, Dyn Media onboarded Stripe’s Optimized Checkout suite, which includes Link, a solution that stores customers’ payment information for faster transactions. It also implemented Payment Element, which supports multiple payment methods. This ensures payment flexibility for customers, including the ability to accept Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA), which simplifies bank transfers denominated in Euros. Over eight weeks, Stripe’s professional services team worked with Dyn Media to implement solutions, apply best practices, and oversee the launch.
Outcome | Launching in under 12 Months to target audience of 17 Million Viewers
Following its successful launch in under 12 months, Dyn Media uses more than 150 AWS services across different layers of its tech stack to enhance user experiences—supporting the sportscaster’s content delivery to a target market of 17 million viewers. “By building on AWS, we were able to create an event-driven architecture that scales from zero to 100,000 users in 45 seconds,” said Moritz Muecke, head of product and technology. “It is difficult to find a service that can support that load.”
The collaboration with Stripe’s professional services team allowed Dyn Media to ensure a disruption-free launch and post-launch operations. Stripe Billing has enabled the sportscaster to offer annual and monthly subscriptions and continue to add payment options. This lets Dyn Media handle high transaction volumes—such as during its early platform sign-ups and registration fee collection. By delivering on its promise of 99.999 percent uptime, Stripe ensures that Dyn Media benefits from uninterrupted service during peak periods. Along with providing secure and reliable payment processing, Stripe has empowered Dyn Media to maximize revenue by increasing conversion, reducing churn, and handling traffic spikes.
“Stripe’s professional guidance, along with its comprehensive payment and billing solutions, helps us build trust and confidence with our customers,” said Mücke. Heyden added, “The functionality and dependability that AWS and Stripe provide has prepared us for the next stage of growth."
About Dyn Media
Dyn Media is an innovative streaming platform offering live broadcasts and highlights of German handball, basketball, volleyball, hockey, and table tennis. It also provides first-class, freely accessible social media content to amplify the visibility and appreciation of these sports among fans, sponsors, and media.
About AWS Partner Stripe
Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, the company aims to increase the GDP of the internet.
AWS Services Used
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources, making it the fastest way to turn an idea into a modern, production, serverless applications.
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