The Netflix and Amazon model that has revolutionised entertainment TV viewing is being brought to the world of sport, as a London-based streaming service looks to take on the giants of pay-TV.
Few British viewers will have heard of DAZN, pronounced “Dazone” and part of the sports media group Perform, but the business sent shockwaves through the sports world last week with a $1bn (£736m) deal to revolutionise pay-per-view boxing in the US.
The exclusive eight-year deal with Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing, which promotes fighters including the world heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua, has taken a leaf directly out of the Netflix playbook. Broadcasters HBO and Showtime dominate top-flight boxing, charging anywhere up to $70 to $100 for a pay-per-view package gathering a few million viewers per fight night.
DAZN charges closer to $12 a month and intends to challenge pay-per view TV byamassing tens of millions of customers willing to watch a wide range of sports content cheaply.
“We have seen in music with Spotfiy and TV with Netflix and Amazon that people will pay a sensible amount of money for a good service,” the Perform chief executive, Simon Denyer, said. “We want to be a Netflix for sport.”
Denyer said the company has the financial firepower to be a real threat. He adds that when the hugely anticipated heavyweight fight between Joshua and Deontay Wilder is finally scheduled, it intends to outpunch HBO and Showtime for the exclusive US rights – which would be a mammoth coup. “If the fight happens we want to show it on DAZN and have a significant budget to negotiate it to get it on the platform,” he said.
Denyer is full of fighting talk because in the 18 months since launching DAZN it has already begun to make waves against rivals such as Sky and he has deep pockets to keep the momentum going.
Perform is in many ways a British success story – founded in Feltham, London, with about 1,800 of its 3,000 global staff spread from Hammersmith to Leeds – although it is owned by the Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard Blavatnik’s Access Industries. Blavatnik also owns Warner Music and has a stake in Spotify.
Blavatnik – who took the decade-old Perform Group private in a £700m deal in 2014, after it listed on the FTSE 250 in 2011 – has enabled DAZN to make its mark in countries where there are opportunities to strike reasonable deals for sports rights, such as Germany, Japan and soon the US.
Next season, DAZN will show more Champions League matches than Sky to sports fans in Germany, where it also has the exclusive rights to air the Premier League, and in Japan it pulled off a coup by taking the J-League football rights off traditional TV in an exclusive 10-year streaming deal.
Denyer said the model is exactly the same as that of Netflix and Amazon but mostly focused on live sport. While providers such as Sky and BT only air a fraction of the football matches for any competition they have the rights for, DAZN is going down the equivalent of the Netflix/Amazon binge-watching route.
“We are often showing 30 or 40 matches live at once,” Denyer said. “On a typical week we will air 130 matches – we’ve found the average user watches about five.”
Denyer says across the five countries in which DAZN has launched to date – Germany, Japan, Austria, Switzerland and Canada – the “blended average” per month subscription charge is only $12. Sky’s average is £46, although in households hooked on sport it is easily double that, including packages such as broadband and telephone.
“Netflix and Amazon have proved that large numbers of people are willing to pay a reasonable amount per month [for streaming services],” Denyer said. “Prices have come down while the quality and quantity of content has dramatically increased. We want to do the same for sport.”
However, while Sky’s model makes the company close to £1.5bn in profits annually, to achieve the low-cost sports revolution dream Blavatnik is going to have to be prepared to rack up potentially billions in losses buying sports rights until the customer base grows to a size to reach profitability.
Last year, while DAZN showed tremendous growth, with revenues rocketing from £8.7m to £90.8m, the overall Perform Group, which also sells some digital sports rights to other media groups, saw its operating losses quadruple from £50.8m to £214m.
Nevertheless, DAZN is not the only brand to start to see the potential to disrupt the sports broadcasting market.
Last month Amazon struck a $130m non-exclusive streaming deal for NFL matches, alongside NBC and CBS, and in the UK it has deals for the US Open tennis, ATP Tour (previously on Sky) and is still in talks with the Premier League over two potential packages of streaming rights. Disney is gearing up to launch a streaming service based on ESPN content.
The UK market is not on DAZN’s radar. The rise in costs fuelled by the rivalry between Sky and BT in recent years has made it harder for a new entrant but Denyer says the sports viewing revolution is going to be global.
“There is going to be a significant change in pay-TV over the coming years,” Denyer said. “The question is: do traditional companies transition successfully or do new entrants like us make a better job of it?”