How DAZN moves at the speed of live sports with LucidLink

Meet DAZN

DAZN is driving the digital transformation of sport on a hyper-personalised, intuitive and interactive platform. With the most compelling proposition, DAZN is the partner of choice for the world’s top leagues, rights holders, and brands. The company has more than 300 million viewers in owned and operated networks.

Background

Behind DAZN’s output is a creative operations team built to move fast.

Matt Lee, Lead Editor at DAZN, has edited sport for more than 30 years and leads about 15 editors and post-production technical assistants across London, Leeds and Hyderabad, India.

Nick Lewis, Head of Automation at DAZN, has spent 15 years in sports broadcasting and builds in-house automated graphics and video workflows, working with third parties on tools that deliver content to territories worldwide.

Their teams keep DAZN’s content moving, whatever the sporting calendar throws at them. In the past, that meant external drives and 14-hour days. Matt and Nick share how they changed that with LucidLink.

The challenge: delivering global campaigns with little lead time

DAZN has to turn around campaigns that reach 10 to 12 markets in multiple languages, often with almost no warning.

“We can be on a call on a Friday morning and say we’re broadcasting a new sport on Saturday, and we’ve got to be really quick and reactive,” Nick explained.

The creative team’s job is to tell the human story of sport, while the technical side has to scale around it. Matt’s editors and Nick’s automation team share one goal: keep creatives focused on the craft and take the logistics out of their way.

Editing on locked-down kit

Before LucidLink, DAZN’s editors worked on-site, on dedicated workstations tied to a media asset manager, with no internet access. They didn’t have the latest Premiere Pro version, or After Effects, and all technology ran through the engineering department.

In 2020, the team was forced to work from home while still delivering documentaries. The workflow still depended on hardware: content went onto external drives, was cut, went for review and only the final assets were uploaded to the cloud. The cost fell on the people doing the work. “We were working 12- to 14-hour days to get the content out on time,” Matt recalled.

The setup couldn’t scale either. A project belonged to whoever was holding the drive, so handing work between London, Germany and India was slow, and any change of plan meant chasing files.

The solution: collaborating in the cloud without moving data

Matt found LucidLink while looking for a way to collaborate across remote teams without moving data around.

Because LucidLink mounts on the desktop like a local drive, editors didn’t have to learn a new way of working. They drag assets into Premiere Pro and work from the cloud, and everyone knows where the content lives.

Onboarding in minutes

Onboarding went from a logistics problem to a few minutes of setup.

“All I require is the email address for the editor,” Matt explains. “I send them a link to access LucidLink, and while they’re downloading the app, I can set up their pathways so I know exactly where they’re working. There’s no need to move physical drives or do any hardware configuration. It’s done within minutes.”

Bringing Foxtel into the fold

The same setup scaled when DAZN acquired Foxtel. The Foxtel creative team received DAZN’s brand fonts, motion templates and new brand build through LucidLink, so they could create content quickly and pass it to Hyderabad to master and reformat.

The results: a global team that works like it’s in one room

Speed, wherever the team is

Matt often works from outside broadcasts, including boxing and the Club World Cup, where editors may sit in a stadium bunker with a weak connection. Even there, LucidLink means he can keep working and cutting.

And if an editor calls in sick, the team doesn’t miss a beat. “I can set up another account for another freelancer or staffer straight away, check everything is in LucidLink, and they can run with a project straight away,” Matt added.

A global team that feels local

Projects that once stayed in London now start there and are picked up in Germany or Hyderabad. When a boxer pulls out of a fight, the files are already in LucidLink. A spelling mistake that slips past QC in India can be fixed by Matt from home on a Saturday morning.

Room for the creative work

With the foundation in place, Nick’s team can automate the friction around the creative work and leave the craft alone.

“We think the human element of sport is really important, so we empower our creatives to run wild with their campaigns,” he says. “Then we take over the technical aspect and remove the friction points that come with scaling a campaign.”

What’s next: applying AI and automation to workflows

DAZN builds its automated workflows in Python, so LucidLink’s new API and SDK fit right in.

He and Matt are now building an automated recipe for 15-second product promos, a backbone of DAZN’s global output.

Ready to simplify your sports broadcasting workflow? Try LucidLink free today.