Babcock Media Services has won a contract to provide delivery management facilities for the Perform Group’s new multi-screen OTT subscription sports service DAZN.

DAZN was launched in HD in Germany, Austria and Switzerland this week and will be rolled out in Japan soon. It will feature live and on-demand coverage of the English Premier League in Germany and Austria, as well as live Spanish, Italian and French football, the NBA and NFL. From 2017, it will also have highlights of the German Bundesliga and rights to broadcast Japan’s J League.

A bespoke control room operation with dedicated staff has been put in place inside Babcock’s playout and distribution centre in Vauxhall, London, to service the deal under which it will manage and monitor the entire workflow, from incoming feeds to the end user.

Babcock will provide encoding, encryption, transcoding and publishing services before streams are delivered to the Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

Its responsibilities also take in subscriptions, the online video management system, metadata and viewer quality of service monitoring.

For the latter, a dedicated testing area will check the service on smart TVs, tablets, games consoles and different web browsers.

ThePlatform is providing the online video platform and Conviva is supplying quality of service and experience analysis.

Babcock director of broadcast services Dean Haddock told Broadcast the contract is driven by the need to ensure that services are constantly available.

“Our service level agreement is 99.995% availability,” he said.

“But what DAZN is most focused on is not the corporate world of availability, it is the end-user experience and ensuring the best sports content is delivered to fans in the best quality possible all of the time.”

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