DAZN has been mentioned for months as a possible option for local pro sports rights, and one of its top executives is now on the record about the company’s plans.
In a piece published Friday, DAZN CEO of growth markets Pete Oliver told Tom Friend of Sports Business Journal that the company is both in discussions to acquire local broadcast rights to individual NBA teams and interested in housing the league’s widely expected centralized local distribution platform, whenever that should launch.
The local rights situation is operating on two timelines. The first is an immediate scramble by teams who have suddenly found themselves without broadcast partners thanks to the decline of Main Street Sports Group, whose FanDuel Sports Network RSNs carried their final major sportscast Thursday when the NHL Minnesota Wild concluded their first round Stanley Cup playoff series. The second is a longer-term effort by leagues to launch their own local rights solution by the end of this decade.
For companies like DAZN, involvement in the former could pave the road to involvement in the latter.
In the NBA, nearly half of the 29 U.S.-based teams — 13 total — were under contract with Main Street Sports Group this past season and will need a new home after that company winds down its operations.
Oliver told Friend that DAZN is in “good discussions with a number of teams who are looking for a home for next season,” touting its “long-term sustainable business model” as a way to increase both reach and revenue. According to Friend, the company is pitching teams on a rights fee in the range of $8-15 million/year, with games distributed through its paid app — which costs $31/mo ($21/mo if a user commits to an annual subscription).
As was the case in the later years of the Main Street Sports Group era, a handful of games (10-15) would be made available for free, either via local over-the-air affiliates or via the app, per Friend.
Based in London, DAZN is a global sports brand whose U.S. presence has thus far been limited to combat sports and soccer. Its entry into the local rights discussion began late last year, when The Wall Street Journal reported that it was in talks to acquire a majority stake in Main Street. It is reasonable to assume that at some point in the process, DAZN realized it made more sense to acquire rights for itself than to absorb them via purchase of financially troubled regional cable assets.
DAZN is just one contender for rights to those teams, with Friend describing Disney-owned Fubo as the “main competition” — offering similar rights fees and perhaps more importantly, a more traditional distribution model via cable, satellite and streaming MVPDs. Victory+, which recently acquired rights to the WNBA Lynx, is also said to be in the mix for a handful of the available teams.
Teams could also opt for the ‘beam and stream’ model that has become commonplace in the years since the RSN model began to crumble, or for creating their own RSNs.
While Oliver’s interview specifically focused on the NBA, DAZN has been previously mentioned as having interest in acquiring local rights to Major League Baseball teams and being part of that league’s widely expected centralized local solution.
