A conversation with Vincenzo Roggio, Head of Distribution at DAZN
(An interview by Christian Cinetto)
The evening of September 21, 2019, is one of those evenings that every football fan knows perfectly well in its more saturated colors than usual, in the radio echoes, in the morning teasing: it’s the first derby of the season between Inter and Milan. This time, however, there’s something different. For the first time, the derby is broadcast exclusively via streaming, a crucial test for DAZN and for Vincenzo Roggio, current head of distribution of the platform.
“I remember sitting in front of the TV with my laptop on my legs, one eye on the match and the other on the statistics, checking every detail,” he recalls. “It was a historic moment, and it went well, both for the company and for me, an Inter fan.”
Year after year, video streaming via Internet evolves technologically with great speed. Vincenzo Roggio represents one of the key figures at DAZN, the platform that has revolutionized how millions of people access sporting events in over 200 countries worldwide and, since 2018, football viewing in Italy. What follows is our chat.
Let’s start with the basics: who is Vincenzo Roggio and how did you get to DAZN?
I started working in the streaming world almost by chance, when I was still a student. I sent my resume to Sky and that’s where it all began. I fell in love with streaming and never left it. After Sky, I moved to Limelight and in 2018 I landed at DAZN, right during the service launch in Italy. DAZN was then only present in Japan, Canada, and Germany. In six years, we’ve become a global platform, present in over 200 territories.
Streaming is often perceived as something taken for granted, a bit like water coming from the home tap, but we know there’s enormous complexity behind making it work. What are the main challenges you face?
One of the biggest challenges is related to user perception. In English, they say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” people struggle to change habits, it takes time. With traditional TV, if the signal doesn’t arrive, people think it’s an antenna problem. With streaming, however, users always blame the content provider. Over-the-top involves many parts of the chain, like ISPs, Internet exchange points, and CDN operators. We collaborate with all three of these actors, working with a mix of our own infrastructure and global CDNs to ensure efficient and resilient content distribution. The change has led to considering it normal to be able to watch a football match from the train or review highlights that I’ve downloaded and use them even without a signal.
Technology changes and with it user expectations. How has service quality evolved over the years? Has the entire supply chain grown, or has DAZN grown?
Well, I don’t want to say it’s all DAZN’s merit, but the service has improved, it really improves week by week. DAZN has invested heavily in infrastructure, and Italy is a case study. Fundamentally, we’re a company that works with data, sees what the performance is, sees what the areas for improvement might be, and improves. All this is done in partnership with ISPs, Internet Exchanges, and CDN operators; it’s group work where you must work together. One cannot guarantee the service without the other. Today all our content is in full HD, and we have an R&D department testing various technologies like HDR, HEVC, 4K. Latency compared to traditional TV is a constant challenge, but we continuously test innovative solutions. These advances always require a balance between perceived quality and service stability.
You were telling me that you collaborate with Internet Service Providers, a love-hate relationship I imagine?
At the moment, I can say there’s a lot of collaboration. From an investment perspective, we’ve given a lot to ISPs; it’s known, for example, that we’ve distributed caches and continue to increase the number distributed in Italy. We’ve followed ISP requests to ensure traffic circulates within the ISP without going through transits. Then weekly, we talk with ISPs, share what our traffic forecasts are, how we think to allocate it, how traffic will be rerouted, in which areas, and then we provide performance data.
Interesting, obviously we won’t talk about the so-called fair share. From what you tell me, DAZN has both its own infrastructure and relies on third-party CDN services.
You can’t do everything through your infrastructure. From a technological standpoint, you don’t need to calibrate for peak maximum. We need to have global distribution; it’s very difficult to have servers in every country, in more than 200 territories. So what we do is a mix between private caches and global CDNs. And let’s not forget, as they say in England, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket; there’s the redundancy and resiliency part that always leads us to have global CDNs active. When an anomaly occurs in our network, automatically our player can move to a global CDN without affecting the performance perceived by the user.
Speaking of infrastructure, we’ve discussed ISPs and CDNs. What’s the role of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) for DAZN?
IXPs are fundamental for optimizing traffic. While not having our own caches within IXPs, we collaborate with providers to ensure sufficient capacity. One of our providers is present at Namex and Mix. We don’t rule out the possibility of adding caches at major IXPs in the future.
How does DAZN work the day after, meaning the morning after an important event?
We have a forecast model for how many users will be connected during the match. The model leads us to make all content distribution configurations. I must say that by now we’re very well calibrated, predictions aren’t perfect, but we’re well above 95% adherence. Like all models, ours also requires history. We’ve been doing Serie A for seven years now; it’s a well-oiled model, and the numbers are very precise. The data is shared with ISPs, and the necessary CDN configurations, distribution, and everything are made. The type of distribution changes from match to match. As I said, we try to prioritize our caches. In the post-event review, we look at the data from an audience perspective to feed it back into the model, so the model keeps getting better. At the same time, we look at quality of experience performance. You go there, look, analyze the data, know that for next week you need to do something different. And this is the feeling that the service has improved; it’s a reality we can see from the data, it’s measurable, it’s not just a statement when we say quality has improved.
Can you tell us about an event that left an impression on you?
My first derby remains my strongest memory, but there’s an amusing anecdote. During Covid, sports weren’t being played and our platform was short on live content. Somehow we tried to fill in with content or in addition to what we already had. In Japan, we distributed all episodes of Captain Tsubasa (Holly e Benji), I rewatched them all and discovered that no one knew them in the UK.
In Italy, the Piracy Shield has been at the center of national news for several weeks. We all agree that piracy is a problem, but it’s highly debated. How do you address it at DAZN?
The fight against piracy is super-important. And it’s not just the Piracy Shield. Let’s debunk the myth of Italy as the only country affected by piracy. I can tell you, doing my job, that it’s not just an Italian phenomenon, but a global one. We collaborate with authorities to block illegal content and use advanced technologies to prevent unauthorized downloads. Fighting piracy requires a collective approach from the entire industry. Additionally, we’re experimenting with artificial intelligence to identify suspicious behavior and optimize our countermeasures.
Looking ahead, how do you see the future of streaming?
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are the next big frontiers. These technologies will help us optimize content distribution and identify useful patterns to improve user experience. DAZN will continue to innovate to offer an increasingly better service. Personalization will be at the center of the streaming experience. I imagine a future where each user can access tailor-made curated content, with increasingly advanced interactivity. Streaming won’t just be a way to watch a match, but a true ecosystem of experiences.
