DAZN chief executive Shay Segev says the streamer’s move into local sports is just the first step towards a bigger presence in the US market.
Recent months have seen the sports streaming service acquire local rights to – or strike distribution agreements with – several National Basketball Association (NBA), National Hockey League (NHL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. The deals have helped those teams adapt to the loss of their regional sports network (RSN) partner or declining pay-TV households.
The company also spent a reported US$100 million to acquire ViewLift, which has built direct-to-consumer (DTC) platforms for other teams, and Everpass Media, which distributes National Football League (NFL) Sunday Ticket to bars and restaurants. DAZN can now offer technological and customer service capabilities to other franchises seeking to make the shift, as well as wider distribution.
Speaking at sports industry conference Leaders Week London at Stamford Bridge, Segev said working with the biggest properties on a local level would help establish DAZN in the US and make it easier to negotiate national rights in the future.
“As a global platform that wants to be the biggest sport platform in the world, we have to focus on the biggest market in the world, which is clearly the United States,” he said. “[The] market is quite complex, so we’d been trying to think about the right way to get in.”
“We now have around 35 teams around the US [through rights deals and via ViewLift], which again is an amazing milestone… we basically went from zero to pretty much half of the US teams.
“I hope it will roll up into a bigger deal with the NHL, with the NBA, clearly. We are not there just to become the local broadcaster for a team in a specific state. We want to become a bigger national broadcaster, ideally a global broadcaster as well, and a partner.”
DAZN already hosts the NFL and NHL’s international streaming service, as it does for a range of other properties looking to take advantage of its reach and distribution. The NBA’s DTC service is currently distributed by Amazon Prime Video as part of its domestic and international rights agreement.
The NFL’s and NBA’s rights will not be back on the market for several years, but MLB and the NHL will be looking to renegotiate their deals in the near future. Given the trends behind the demise of RSNs and the decline in pay-TV households, it is possible that more rights could be centralised at league level.
Another league that DAZN is keen to expand its relationship with is Serie A. The broadcaster is already a major partner of Italy’s top-flight soccer league both domestically and in many other territories, including the UK. However, it now sees an opportunity to add matches to its global service, either through rights or as an add-on.
“Ideally we want to do more things like the Fifa Club World Cup [for which DAZN held global rights],” Segev explained.” We’re a very big partner of Serie A. My wish is that we can do a big global partnership with Serie A. Luigi [Di Siervo, Serie A chief executive] and I talk about it. Hopefully at some point we’ll find a way to do it.”
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