DAZN failed to transmit Inter – Cagliari. A technical problem, due to an external provider, which happened at the worst moment, that is a few weeks after the assignment to DAZN of the TV rights for Serie A for the next three years.
DAZN has spent the last few months convincing the Lega Calcio, and some of the fans, that the time is ripe to abandon the “old”, yet yesterday afternoon’s episode puts us in front of what is the harsh reality: streaming today is still too fragile a platform compared to traditional broadcasting.
Platforms like DAZN are defined Over The Top precisely because they live hooked up to other services on the network, and yesterday it was precisely one of these services that betrayed DAZN. By chance it was Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS) to fall, an American company that provides solutions and platforms for those who want to broadcast Live. Comcast Technology Solutions is owned by the same group that owns Sky, but Sky obviously has nothing to do with what happened yesterday: Three other major CTS customers around the world also had problems with DAZN.
We are very saddened by what happened today on our platform. We are absolutely aware of the great responsibility we have towards all fans and the entire world of sport.
As previously announced, we are investigating the issue originated by our partner Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS), which has impacted DAZN and other European broadcasters.
Although the problem has now been resolved, aware of the effect that this situation has had above all on the fans, we will offer appropriate compensation, which will be communicated in the next few days, to those who have encountered anomalies during the matches in the afternoon “
The problem, according to DAZN, is linked to authentication, or rather, to the management of DRMs that enable users to view content that must be encrypted by contract. Like yesterday there was a problem at Comcast Technology Solutions, tomorrow something could happen to the CDN provider. Or to the single app. Or to the nodes of the local network, or to a specific area, or to a specific device.
By its nature and design a streaming platform for live events, and this applies to all of them, it has a higher probability of having problems than a traditional broadcasting platform.
History also says it: Sky and Mediaset, even going back in time, have never prevented a fan from following an entire football match. There were some occasional problems, linked in the case of Sky to adverse weather conditions in a particular area of Italy, but at most the black-out it lasted a few fractions of the game.
DAZN will bring Serie A into a new, more innovative dimension in the coming years, but fragility will be part of this revolution. It will not be easy to explain to the fan why he hasn’t seen a match, or a piece of the match: 99% of people won’t care whose fault it is, whether from the network, the operator, the device or an external partner, for them the fault will always be DAZN who took away the promised emotions.
This is why it is necessary for DAZN to understand the importance of the backup channel, and the importance of making it accessible to all: if there had been a backup via digital terrestrial, since this is the chosen solution, yesterday everyone could have followed the game without problems. The backup solution in fact provides a decoding on the set top box, is less dependent on the external network and skips several fragile steps. All operators who offer DAZN today through their platform, in the form of an app, should also be able to access the channel that arrives over the air and manage it accordingly, as “plan B”. Everyone, from Sky with Sky Q, to Vodafone with the TV Box to the various Smart TV manufacturers, since the televisions have both a network socket and a tuner.
Precisely to avoid, in the next three years, that what happened yesterday becomes normal.
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