As the largest and one of the most popular football clubs in Greece, PAOK FC decided to become its own television broadcasting rights holder for club matches. After launching its own OTT platform for the 2019-2020 season, the club decided to enhance the fan experience by totally redesigning PAOK TV. PAOK FC also found that the need for infrastructure to remain in place in between high traffic matches was an unnecessary cost that could be removed with a cloud infrastructure.

Better, safer, faster

PAOK FC’s motto is #DareToDream. When it comes to being its own rights holder, PAOK FC dreamt big to ensure its video service would be better, safer, and faster for fans. Its new OTT platform needed to improve the user experience of its current service and be fully cloud-based, as well as integrated with strong security solutions.

Building its service on Amazon Web Services not only enabled a seamless experience for fans receiving videos instantly with little latency but also allowed for fully scalability. Naturally, the popular football club’s live matches attract huge peaks in viewer numbers. Having the ability to scale up for those matches allowed PAOK FC to keep infrastructure minimal at other times.

Insys Sport enabled a new viewing experience that is both modern and natural, with an OTT solution designed specifically for sports content. The Insys Video Technologies team quickly developed an engaging user experience to appeal to the club’s fans. Insys Multi DRM uses encryption and licenses to ensure that the content stays secure. A combination of watermarking is applied to identify and block any users streaming illegally.

Ready for the new season

The new version of PAOK TV was developed in the break between football seasons. The new season started in August 2020. At that time, PAOK FC shifted its focus to provide the best possible viewing experience for its fans.

CASE STUDY

Executive summary

For the 2019-20 football season, PAOK FC launched PAOK TV, an OTT platform that provides live matches, postgame shows, and on-demand content directly to fans across Greece and the world. The initial launch disrupted football TV Rights in Greece, demonstrating a new way to broadcast the matches and exploit new technologies. It enabled the club to manage its own TV rights exclusively across the world.

Following this initial success, PAOK FC was looking to launch a new version of the OTT Service as part of a wider overhaul of the club’s digital strategy. PAOK FC wanted the new platform to be visually better, automated, have a modern interface, and be user-friendly. Panagiotis Aroniadis, PAOK TV Project Manager and PAOK FC New Media Director, FC PAOK, said: “We decided to create a new OTT platform from the beginning so that we could become better, faster, safer and offer a better user experience for our subscribers. #DareToDream is more than a motto for us”.

PAOK TV, developed by Insys Video Technologies, is a subscription and pay per view based platform that broadcasts the club’s home games for Greek Super League and exclusive VOD content along with special TV Shows. It includes 25 live matches in each season, three-hour broadcasts with pregame and postgame shows along with on-demand content from training, talk shows, and exclusive interviews. The platform is available in three languages – Greek, English, Russian.

Moving to the Cloud

PAOK FC decided that the new version of its OTT platform should be entirely cloud-based, running on Amazon Web Services. This would be key to enable the club to reduce infrastructure costs during low traffic periods while being able to auto-scale for those traffic spikes during live matches, for example. Thanks to a pay-per-use model, the budget could remain viable for the club. The presence of an Amazon CloudFront edge location in Greece ensures matches can be streamed live with extremely low latency.

Improving the User Experience

PAOK FC was keen to ensure good user experience for fans. This meant being able to deliver content to every available platform in the highest quality, with low latency. Panagiotis Aroniadis, New Media Director at PAOK FC commented: “It is important for us to turn PAOK TV into a complete, modern, easy to use, user-friendly service that during the live match turns into a viewing experience.”

At the same time, ensuring protection against piracy was naturally high on the agenda given the premium nature of the content being delivered to fans.

Insys Sport

Insys Video Technologies provided a fully cloud-based, end-to-end solution built on AWS Cloud. The platform is based on Insys Sport, a complete and flexible solution designed for companies and organizations who want to improve sports fans’ experience by sharing their sports video content online in an innovative way. PAOK FC can easily handle high website traffic thanks to the scalable AWS cloud environment.

The new PAOK TV service uses Insys Multi DRM, which protects the video content from piracy using encryption and digital licenses. Insys VT also integrated a watermarking solution. Floating watermarks appear randomly in different places on the screen. After a sequence of watermarks, PAOK FC can easily see who is streaming the match illegally and that user can be blocked instantly.

Delivering Flexibility with the Cloud

The new version of PAOK TV has been integrated with a number of AWS Media Services, managed cloud services that make it fast and easy to prepare, process, and deliver broadcast and multiscreen video at scale. This includes AWS Elemental MediaPackage, which reliably prepares and protects the video for delivery over the Internet. From a single video input, AWS Elemental MediaPackage creates video streams formatted to play on multiple devices. PAOK TV uses AWS Elemental MediaConvert to transcode and create video-on-demand content.

During the live matches, AWS Elemental MediaLive creates high-quality video streams ready for delivery, while these are delivered using AWS Elemental MediaConnect.

Thanks to Amazon CloudFront, video content is delivered securely with low latency and high transfer speeds. The cloud environment also enables auto-scaling to cover traffic spikes during matches. The new PAOK TV can be viewed via web browsers, mobile devices, Android TV, LG webOS, and Samsung Smart TV Tizen.

In the 2019-20 season, the original PAOK TV attracted more than 200k total subscribers and delivered 5,000 hours of content. The new version of PAOK TV was launched in time for the restart of football and PAOK FC expects viewer numbers to be even greater for the new football season.