DAZN’s media rights strategy has fueled continued growth and seen it soar to the tenth most-watched streaming video service in Spain for the first time, according to the latest consumer research from Ampere Analysis. It is also in eleventh place in Italy, where it holds exclusive rights to the majority of games for the flagship football league, Serie A.
Excluding the social media services, DAZN is actually the fifth most-watched service in Spain, behind only the three leading SVOD services and Movistar’s TV Everywhere service (and marginally ahead of national broadcaster RTVE’s free-to-access streaming service). The achievement is particularly noteworthy considering that DAZN is pay-to-access and a sport-specialist platform, which naturally limits its breadth of appeal compared to services that offer wider entertainment content, Ampere noted.
Demographically, DAZN’s viewership skews younger than six of the other top 10 services, including the SVOD giants, with 44% of monthly active users aged between 18-34. It also skews wealthier than all nine other services (53% of viewers have a household income above €30k), offering an attractive audience for advertisers.
Furthermore, Ampere’s Sport Consumer survey shows that DAZN viewers are more likely than the average sports fan in Spain to bet on sport, buy merchandise, and be familiar with non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This bodes well for the company as it looks to diversify revenues across these spaces.
“DAZN has been the major disruptive force in the sports rights markets since it launched in 2016. As the largest sports-dedicated subscription OTT service in the world by spend, in 2022 it accounted for around half of all streaming investment in sports rights. At present, its largest rights deal is in Italy, where in 2021 it acquired the exclusive rights to most of the Serie A games and co-exclusive rights to the remainder for €840 million per season. In the previous rights cycle, it took up a smaller Serie A package, but the 2021 investment propelled it to become the largest investor in sports rights in the country, with a current market share of 57%,” said Daniel Monaghan, Senior Analyst at Ampere Analysis.
DAZN’s second-largest deal is in Spain, where in 2022 it acquired co-exclusive rights to air LaLiga games for an estimated €456 million per season (alongside Telefonica-owned pay TV incumbent, Movistar Plus), complementing a portfolio that includes the English Premier League and premium motor racing events, Formula 1 and MotoGP, to drive viewership.
“The LaLiga deal places DAZN as the second largest media rights investor in Spain, with a market share of 38%, behind only Movistar Plus. This strategy has seen it earn fifth-largest investor status in sports media rights globally, and helped it achieve top ranking as one of the most-used streaming video services in some of the major European markets,” Monaghan concluded.
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