Inside DAZN's Game-Changing Production Feat at the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup

Inside DAZN's Game-Changing Production Feat at the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup The streaming service and its partners delivered 63 matches from 12 sites to 200 markets By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.

Monday, August 11, 2025 - 2:03 pm

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Soccer is the world's most powerful cultural connector, and DAZN's mission is to make the sport more accessible to fans across the globe. That mission took a bold leap in late 2024 when DAZN secured the global rights to the FIFA Club World Cup, just six months ahead of the kickoff of the U.S.-based tournament. What followed was a production challenge unlike any before - arguably the fastest, most complex, and unprecedented global live sports broadcast ever attempted.

Among the non-negotiable - and exceptionally demanding - requirements was the delivery of every match in HDR10 with Dolby Audio 5.1. In addition to these premium feeds, DAZN also had to provide SDR stereo feeds for its Freemium viewers worldwide, further multiplying production demands.

But perhaps the most technically staggering requirement was the multiplicity of versions. With multilingual commentary, regional graphics, and multiple format needs, DAZN was tasked with producing as many as 26 unique variants per match. Each version required its own custom elements, and the infrastructure supporting the effort had to handle more than 4,500 sources and 100+ concurrently produced feeds - all in real time.

The DAZN Match Centre was housed in NEP's South Florida facility, which provided control rooms, production ops, and war room.

With the clock ticking and the world watching, we built an end-to-end infrastructure designed for scale, speed, and reliability, says Caroline Ewerton, SVP, content operations and Technology, DAZN. Within weeks, we activated a distributed production network across 12 international locations, centralized match-feed localization, and stood up a brand-new 2110-based master-control room [MCR] engineered for agility, resiliency, and sustainability.

A First: Each Match Streamed Live and Free to 200+ Markets As exclusive global-broadcast partner, DAZN made history: streaming every match live and free to fans in more than 200 markets, marking a world first for a men's international club-football competition.

This was a moment to rewire the model, to fuse the best of broadcast and digital into something fundamentally new, says DAZN CTO Sandeep Tiku. We didn't just distribute the tournament; we rebuilt how the world experiences it.

NEP's Datacenter in Dallas coordinated signal-acquisition and network operations.

Together, DAZN and its technology partners - NEP, Telstra, Amagi, M2A Media, MediaKind, TAG Video Systems, Techex -delivered a cutting-edge, full-stack production ecosystem capable of this colossal undertaking.

The infrastructure enabled DAZN to manage more than 100 concurrent feeds, 26 match-feed variants per game, multilingual production in 17 languages, and Dolby 5.1 and HDR integration. In addition, the streaming service relied on real-time monitoring from six global hubs: Dallas; South Florida; Hilversum, Netherlands; Leeds, UK; Bangor, Northern Ireland; and Hyderabad, India.

In the Beginning: Creating the Most Accessible, Immersive, Scalable Broadcast' Ever DAZN had a clear vision from day one, according to Tiku: to deliver the most accessible, immersive, and scalable broadcast of a global club-football tournament ever attempted. This wasn't just about distribution; it was about reimagining what global live sport could be.

DAZN set out to combine the expansive reach of traditional broadcast with the agility, personalization, and interactivity of OTT, while keeping the fan experience at the core of every design decision. This project wasn't just about setting a new benchmark for access, he explains. It was about raising the bar across quality, scale, adaptability, and innovation. We didn't just want to deliver a tournament; we wanted to reimagine what's possible in global live sports streaming.

Inside the DAZN Match Centre in South Florida

Every element had to move in perfect sync, from live signal acquisition across the U.S. (with up to a dozen feeds produced per match) to dynamic localization and global feed distribution through the Match Centre in the U.S. and sublicensee network. Despite the challenges, in a matter of months, DAZN was able to create an ecosystem capable of delivering seamless, premium-quality broadcasts to fans.

[This set] a new benchmark for speed, innovation, and operational excellence in live sports production - and proof of what's possible when purpose, technology, and talent align, says Ewerton. This wasn't just a broadcast. It was DAZN redefining global sport - again.

Sprinting toward the tournament's June kickoff, DAZN enlisted several strategic partners. NEP Group served as its core Match Centre partner, responsible for feed versioning, HDR/SDR integration, and real-time Dolby de-encoding. FIFA and tournament host broadcaster HBS delivered the necessary venue feeds from across the U.S. in 1080p 59.94 HLG with 5.1 surround sound. Telstra provided feed-distribution networks, and Amagi supported playout for regionalized advertising, SCTE, and graphics. M2A Media and MediaKind handled transcoding, packaging, and global delivery via a multi-CDN strategy. And TAG Video Systems and Techex enabled scalable, centralized, and real-time MCR monitoring and infrastructure.

Match Centre: The Axis on Which DAZN's Club World Cup Operation Spun DAZN Match Centre in South Florida provided control rooms, production ops, and war room.

To pull it all off, DAZN partnered with NEP Group to build and operate its Match Centre in the U.S., which served as the nerve center for its global production ecosystem. At

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2025/08/11/inside-dazns-game-changing-prod...
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