DAZN: “Premier League rights essential for UK launch”
October 10, 2019
John Skipper, executive chairman of DAZN, has said the OTT sports service would need to acquire Premier League football rights before considering a UK launch.
Despite being based in London, the platform currently only operates in the US, Japan, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Canada, Italy, Spain and Brazil. DAZN also holds rights to Champions League football in several South East Asian countries
Speaking at the Leaders Sport Business Summit in London, Sportcal reported Skipper as saying: “The UK is a logical DAZN market. When you think about what we’ve done, we’ve launched in four continents so we want to show a global footprint. We’ve launched in big markets, Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain, USA and Brazil, so if you took the next largest markets, they would be the most likely markets for us to launch in and that’s places like the UK In terms of the rights in this country, obviously you need Premier League rights.”
He added that “boxing is [also] very important here and tennis is very important here.”
The last round of domestic Premier League rights sales were concluded in 2018 and do not come up again until 2022, with Amazon having joined well-established pay-TV players Sky and BT Sport in acquiring game packages. Amazon will stream all fixtures from two full game-weeks in December.