The German Football League (DFL) is providing its international rights-holding broadcasters with IP-based live streaming through its tie-up with Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing subsidiary of Amazon.
Ahead of the start of the 2020-21 Bundesliga tonight, the DFL has detailed the additional broadcast distribution services on offer to rights-holding broadcasters.
Bayern Munich face Schalke 04 in the season opener and Bundesliga International, the league’s commercial rights arm, has finalised more rights deals shortly before the kick-off of the new season. These include a deal in Latin America, where Claro Sports telecoms giant América Móvil has acquired the rights with the exception of Brazil, where a free-to-air rights deal has now been agreed with commercial broadcaster Band.
Through its work with AWS, the Bundesliga’s live programming will be available to rights-holding broadcasters as cloud-based streams.
The league said today (Friday): “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 is to create the international media products for all aspects of the Bundesliga matches before feeding the corresponding video signals into AWS for automatic processing and encoding using a variety of AWS Media Services.
The league detailed: “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.”
Rights-holding broadcasters will be able to use the league’s ‘Customer Service Tool’ to book streams from Bundesliga matches with the DFL using AWS’ content delivery network and DNS (Domain Name System) service to generate a URL for broadcasters to access the streams.
The Bundesliga became the first football league to work with AWS in a deal announced at the start of this year. The initial focus of the deal, which runs for at least five years, includes the supply of advanced real-time statistics for viewers during live coverage and highlights clips, providing personalised content on digital platforms and using AWS cloud infrastructure, advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies.
Last-minute rights deals finalised
Meanwhile, Claro has announced its acquisition of Bundesliga rights across Latin America (excluding Brazil).
Matches will be shown on the Claro Sports channel with the telecoms giant continuing its cross-platform approach through the free streaming of matches on the Marco Claro digital platform. Claro Sports and media group Marca first entered into a content alliance at the start of 2017 and with the aim of becoming the regional reference point for sports news.
The first match to be aired by both Claro Sports and Marca Claro will be Sunday’s clash between VfL Wolfsburg and Bayer Leverkusen.
In Brazil, commercial broadcaster Band has, as expected, agreed a deal to show one match per week on free-to-air television.
Band is to air Sunday’s match between RB Leipzig and Mainz as it kicks off its Bundesliga output.
Bundesliga International was left with the rights to sell one match per match week to a linear broadcaster after signing a wide-ranging deal in Brazil with OneFootball, the Germany-based digital platform, and the Sportfive.
Fox Sports, which has merged with ESPN in Brazil, held the Bundesliga rights in Brazil from 2015-16 to 2019-20 as part of an 80-territory deal across various international territories across Asia, the Americas and Europe.
The represents the second major European football league shown by Band after it recently bought the rights to the Italian Serie A in a one-season deal. Band also holds rights to the Russian Premier League and the women’s top-tier league in Brazil.