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

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.

“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.”

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.”

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

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 the Match Centre, DAZN and NEP seamlessly integrated feeds from FIFA’s International Broadcast Coordination Centre (IBCC) and orchestrated workflows across DAZN studios in Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, and partner sites in the UK, France, Portugal, Mexico, and Atlanta.

Designed to handle the demands of a 24/7 global tournament, the infrastructure was built for flexibility and accommodated early-morning call times, late-night wrap-ups, and multiple overlapping shifts across continents. Thanks to cloud-based orchestration, DAZN’s teams could collaborate in real time, switch between studios dynamically, and route signals intelligently across time zones, enabling a smooth, unified broadcast operation that could handle the tournament’s global scale.

After being brought on in February — just four months before the tournament was set to kick off — NEP managed all 4,500 feed sources, producing 24 unique versions per game to meet DAZN’s sponsorship and language requirements. NEP’s global production footprint spanned Dallas (Datacenter and Network Operations Center), South Florida (control rooms, production ops, and war room), and Hilversum (European gateway). Triggering of on-air graphics, switching between studio and game, and time alignment were all done through the South Florida facility.

“NEP has created this strategy to be able to provide solutions for our clients that unlock all the services we can provide,” says NEP Connected Solutions President Josh Liemer. “We realized that we had this infrastructure ready and just had to get it connected. We had a great signal-acquisition center in Dallas, a great operational place in South Florida, and a great live center in Hilversum. We had a great head start and just needed to bring this together. This was really one NEP coming together.”

NEP also enabled HDR integration and Dolby de-encoding, multilingual support, real-time orchestration, and signal-routing redundancy, including fully redundant encoding, upmixed studio audio, and resilient paths via fiber, satellite, and SRT. At the center of it all was NEP’s TFC orchestration system, which helped manage the extremely complex IP workflows running throughout DAZN’s media-supply chain.

“Our Match Centre provisioned by NEP was critical to the success of this project,” says Ewerton. “Their adaptive workflow, orchestration via TFC, and seamless collaboration across all DAZN production locations made this project of unprecedented complexity and magnitude possible.”

Says NEP Europe CTO John Guntenaar, “We’re so proud of what we did, working as one team in partnership with DAZN. It is important that our global hubs work together, and this was proof. Innovation meets efficiency: that is what our customer came for.”

Adds Ewerton, “The entire system was designed to prioritize fan experience and editorial consistency across regions.”

Match commentary was sourced from a mix of in-stadium, in-studio, and remote locations, requiring tight latency control and alignment. Latency variances across the workflows and locations were mitigated with precision audio sync.

The commentary was provided in English, Spanish, LATAM Spanish, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, Belgium French, Belgium Dutch, Mandarin, Polish, Greek, and Hebrew.

Match feeds were captured in 1080p 59.94 HLG HDR, and, at Match Centre, DAZN and NEP provided real-time SDR-to-HDR upconversion for studio content and HDR-to-SDR downconversion for Freemium viewers, across three distinct versions and formats. In addition, because studio partners were not natively HDR-capable, NEP implemented seamless transitions and ensured consistent frame-rate integrity for playback across all platforms.

“This wasn’t just about high-end delivery but about creating a distinct, high-impact experience for subscribers,” says Ewerton. “It’s a testament to the unprecedented scale and ambition behind this project.”

The Result: A Global Fan Experience for the Ages

In the end, DAZN’s monumental effort paid off in spades: the tournament successfully reached hundreds of millions of viewers across the globe. According to Dan Rayburn’s in-depth Streaming Media Blog post, viewers watched a total of 12.2 billion minutes on tens of millions of devices.

As the DAZN team looks back, both Tiku and Ewerton express immense pride in what the teams achieved, which Tiku describes as “a truly global effort that united staff across the Americas, Europe, and Asia under a single mission: to raise the bar for live sports broadcasting.”

The company also extends heartfelt gratitude to everyone involved — from internal teams to external partners who integrated so seamlessly they were seen as an extension of DAZN’s own crew.

“This was more than just delivering a tournament,” Tiku adds. “It was a moment of industry-defining teamwork and innovation — a historic milestone made possible through global collaboration.”