When it comes to the global distribution of Bundesliga broadcasts, DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga is breaking the technical mould.
The 2020-21 season will start with today’s opening game at the Allianz Arena in Munich between reigning champion FC Bayern Munich and FC Schalke 04. For the first time, the live programmes of the International Product Portfolio of the DFL will also be available as streams from the 2020/21 season onwards. Bundesliga’s official technology provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is powering the implementation. Additionally, the DFL will provide the media rights holders around the world via satellite and fibre, as in the years before.
Thanks to AWS Elemental, broadcasting live Bundesliga matches across any type of device becomes even easier for media rights partners around the world. The DFL is now enabling IP-based live streaming to meet rising demand for over-the-top (OTT) content. AWS Elemental MediaLive provides the DFL with flexible capacity for encoding, independent of resolution or codec requirements. The fully managed service hence enables the DFL to implement encoding without having to invest in new hardware to do so, avoiding lengthy integration and upgrade cycles.
The DFL will create the international media products for all aspects of the Bundesliga matches. DFL will then feed the corresponding video signals into AWS for automatic processing and encoding using a variety of AWS Media Services. From that point, Cologne Broadcasting Center (CBC) will use LOGIC’s ‘PORTAL’ to simultaneously control and monitor the event-based live streams. Up to 13 channels will be launched each match day, which will be controlled by the operators at CBC.
To supply AWS Elemental MediaLive the needed inputs, DFL will use AWS Elemental MediaConnect to transport high-bandwidth mezzanine video streams securely through encryption, providing DFL with the flexibility to perform tasks that are common but not necessarily easy. On the output side, DFL will use AWS Elemental MediaPackage as an origination service to generate all the proper types of Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) outputs to suit the full range of media partners’ and their viewers’ end-user devices, such as smartphones, computers and large screen smart TVs, without needing to increase the encoding workload.
International licensees can use DFL’s Customer Service Tool (CST) to book the relevant streams for Bundesliga matches. With the aid of Amazon CloudFront (content delivery network) and Amazon Route 53 (DNS service), the DFL can generate a URL through which the international licensees can access the streams in HLS and DASH. In order to guarantee reliability, every encoding path for a channel is designed redundantly within AWS Media Services.
All in all, DFL and AWS, supported by LOGIC, continuously innovate on behalf of DFL’s media partners to make it as easy as possible to deliver great content to Bundesliga Fans around the world.
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