DAZN, OTT sports streaming platform, built a new ST 2110-based global Master Control Room in the UK working with Techex, with a live monitoring and control upgrade from TAG Video.
The FIFA Club World Cup 2025 came to an end on 13 July when the final match, between Chelsea FC and Paris Saint-Germain, was held at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The full tournament pulls together 32 of the most successful clubs from every continent to compete in 63 matches. DAZN is the exclusive global broadcast partner, and has delivered every match live and free to fans worldwide – a first for a men’s international club football tournament.
DAZN is a key source of European football and NFL, women’s football, boxing and MMA content, specialising in live and on-demand sports content, anywhere, in any language, on all devices. As well as the FIFA Club World Cup 2025, the DAZN platform features sports and leagues from around the world including Bundesliga, Serie A, LALIGA, Formula 1, NBA, Moto GP and many others.
With global rights to the FIFA tournament, and meanwhile managing continuous demand for their other sports content, DAZN required an infrastructure capable of supporting the complexity and pace of high profile, dynamic sporting events. To meet that demand, DAZN built a new ST 2110-based global Master Control Room [MCR] in Leeds, UK, working in partnership with Techex. Experts in live workflows, Techex helps broadcasters manage live video over IP and in the cloud.
Centralised Control
DAZN’s new production set-up establishes centralised control over more than 5,000 unique video sources and 300 mosaic layouts. Once these signals arrive at DAZN’s core data centres, they are routed directly to the company’s operational hubs in Leeds, Northern Ireland and Hyderabad.
This workflow reduces bandwidth usage, avoids infrastructure duplication and allows the team to route any source to any operator or screen without reconfiguration. A part of the new MCR project was an upgrade to its live monitoring capabilities, achieved by adopting TAG’s Media Control System [MCS], managed through a redundant central interface.
With integrated multiviewing, TAG’s MCS is able to monitor and visualise all major compressed and uncompressed stream types in real time, within a single platform. Able to detect over 500 event types across stream layers and media formats, DAZN can proactively identify and address potential problems, and customise their own alert thresholds. The MCS is also useful for collecting data from across the workflow and visualising it using regular IT tools like Kibana, Grafana dashboards and Apache Kafka.
Flexibility and Scalability
An especially valuable function is TAG Bridge, a single-ingest, secure sharing model for replicating signals and transferring streams. Once a source – video, audio, metadata – is received it can be displayed directly on a TAG system. TAG Bridge automatically optimizes the sizing, format and delivery protocol to fit the configuration of multiple destinations. The result is much lower consumption of compute resources network bandwidth.
"The number of different feeds and variants required for DAZN’s broadcasting of the FIFA Club World Cup – on top of our usual workload – made flexibility and scalability a priority to make sure our MCR was monitoring as effectively as possible. Our partnership with Techex and TAG has enabled DAZN to continue delivering a competitive entertainment experience to our users, supported by a modern, up-to-date live sports infrastructure," said David Christmas, Head of Broadcast Project Engineering at DAZN.
Operator Console
To further simplify operations, TAG developed a dedicated Operator Console, designed specifically for DAZN’s live transmission and MCR environments. The touch interface allows operators to interact directly with the mosaic – switching feeds, validating ad markers, adjusting audio and managing alarms in real time. Its straightforward, role-based design minimises complexity and eliminates the need for engineering intervention for daily tasks.
“This project gives DAZN the agility to deliver live sports coverage at global scale,” said Kevin Joyce, Zero Friction Officer at TAG Video Systems. “Together with Techex, we’ve built a monitoring platform that enables smarter operations, faster response and lower operational risk.”
Techex worked in partnership with DAZN’s project and operations teams on the overall system architecture and delivery, focusing on the continued development of DAZN’s orchestrated workflow deployments, utilising tools such as Techex’s tx edge, a software gateway used to protect and monitor DAZN’s signals, optimising signal quality and ensuring delivery.
“We delivered a solution that is technically sound, operator-friendly and built for DAZN’s evolving needs. We needed to address the immediate demand to build an infrastructure to cater for the size and scale of the FIFA Club World Cup 2025, while also considering DAZN’s wider, longer-term responsibilities,” said Richard Bailey, CPTO at Techex. https://tagvs.com/
