I once worked for them, so I might seem biased but hear me out.
Yes, that’s right. I once worked for DAZN. During one of the weirdest periods in living history – especially in the world of sports and broadcasting.
A bit about me; I was at a bit of a crossroads in my career in 2019.
I had about 1.5 years’ experience in recruitment and was made redundant from my latest role when, needing to pay my bills, I was happy to be considered for any role that would consider a skillset like mine.
Apparently, DAZN needed a sharp mind in their rights department.
And I studied law, which implied I had the mind they needed.
Never mind that I couldn’t ever be arsed to take on my law degree into anything solid in the legal profession. I pretty much glossed over that in the interview.
Thereafter, I joined DAZN as a Rights Management & Ops Administrator.
A fancy title for ‘data entry, with a smidgen of rights thrown in’.
In essence, DAZN is a media streaming service – much like a Disney Plus or a Netflix – which needs to purchase the rights from a provider (known as a ‘rights holder’) to show the product that they are in charge of.
The Premier League, Major League Baseball and NFL are all rights holders.
This can range from pre-made individual programmates, like documentaries or a series of some sort, but the juicy stuff comes with all of the live rights.
But it’s not quite as easy as throwing up some money and seeing who catches it.
The process is annoyingly complicated and expensive.
Every country / ‘territory’ will have their own existing media agreements with broadcasters and rights holders about what they can show and when. So, if DAZN came into a country which didn’t already show the content of a rights holder, they could probably position themseslves at the forefront of media streaming in that country – and for a cheap price.
Obviously, that’s now how this world works.
Most territories have an array of existing rights holders, who all maintain a different amount of power depending on which territory we’re talking about.
Using the UK as the predominant focus of this article, we have far too many options to count.
On the one hand – yay! Because it means we can access pretty much every kind of football content that the world has to offer – with Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue Un and, of course, the Premier League and leagues further down the pyramid. available to watch on our little island.
On another hand – ney! Because they’re not offered up by the same rights holder, and therefore do not fall under the same package.
Which means we have to pay for whichever ones we want to watch.
This is why I hope DAZN makes some moves in the UK market.
It annoys me to remember how many direct debits I have at the moment.
I’ve been lucky enough to skive off of my brother’s Netflix account, but have shockingly been made to commit to my own Sky and Amazon subscriptions.
Then, you have BT Sport if you want to watch any of the UEFA competitions. La Liga TV comes under its own terms. Then, for the Manchester United and Liverpool fans in the country (of which there are plenty), there’s an additional cost on top of that.
Oh, and the BBC – have to pay like £150 p/year for a stupid TV license for that!
How much is that? Around £80 p/month all in?
I mean, with the hike in energy prices in this country, the lack of governmental reform in this area and things only seeming to get higher in terms of inflation, I’m sure you’ll agree that the last thing anybody needs is another bill.
It seems as if companies like DAZN agree.
Which is why they offer everything they have – all in – for one single fee.
It’s a pretty small fee at that!
Something like £9.99 p/month.
To watch every kind of sport you would have dreamed of as and when they come in, on top of all the fringe on-demand programming to eat up the rest of your time.
Countries like Germany, Italy and Spain benefit from exactly this.
The UK already seem to have far too many of their fingers at the base of pies that are too sticky to get out of without losing your entire hand, so it probably stands to reason they’re going to be around for a while and DAZN might not even see it possible or reasonable to get into this market given the buy-in and potential return.
But, by jove, I hope they do – it would make my bank account look a lot better.
Hey! Did you enjoy the latest piece on our Twelfth Media Blog? Yes? Okay great! Because here’s another piece you might like too. Different vibe, but still – take a look.