Dyn Media Launches to Millions of Sports Fans in One Year with AWS and Stripe

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.

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.