In 'da zone': New player set to enter fight for Australian sports broadcast rights

A billion-dollar behemoth is wading into Australia's sports rights fight, with DAZN set to launch a streaming service that could emerge as a serious competitor to Fox Sports and Optus.

London-based DAZN (pronounced 'Da Zone'), an over-the-top streaming platform similar to Kayo Sports, has announced plans to expand into more than 200 countries - a dramatic move considering it only operates in nine currently.

DAZN, the London-based sports streaming giant, is expanding into Australia.Credit: Getty Images

Borne out of the sports content and data company Perform, DAZN is little-known in Australia but has successfully disrupted the traditional pay-TV model for sports across Europe and Asia, and is estimated to be spending between US$1 billion and US$1.5 billion per year on rights, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Majority owned by the Ukrainian-born billionaire Sir Len Blavatnik, DAZN has primarily focused on soccer, and has spent millions on the rights for the UEFA Champions League in Germany, Serie A in Italy, and the J.League in Japan, where it signed a deal worth nearly $3 billion over 10 years which began in 2017.

In the United States, DAZN is chiefly known as a broadcaster of combat sports - having sewn up the international rights for several major boxing promotions companies - and that is what the "first step" of its global expansion will centre upon.

Mexican superstar Canelo Alvarez's soon-to-be-announced fight on May 2 will be the first major event shown on DAZN in Australia. But DAZN's SVP of commercial and partnerships, Alex Peebles, said the group will be assessing the domestic landscape closely.

Canelo Alvarez's upcoming fight will be the first major event shown in Australia by DAZN.Credit: AP

"We're very much focused on this as phase one and looking at it from a global perspective," Peebles told the Herald. "If we see opportunity in any market we go into, to go deeper and invest in premium rights specific to that market, we'll look at that in any case and invest as appropriate.

"What we've done is looked at the nine markets we've gone into, the learnings we've had from customer acquisition, what fans are into and what's going to make sense on a global basis.

"That comes off the back of some pretty amazing numbers we've done to date - we streamed over half a billion hours of sport to millions of subscribers last year, and that was just in nine countries.

"We're doing significant scale now and a global rollout helps takes things to the next level."

Peebles said DAZN had "no specific plans" around other sports in Australia, but the rights to Australian rugby - including Wallabies Test matches and Super Rugby - are currently up for grabs and seem an obvious option.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the company's thinking have also suggested DAZN is making strong overtures for the rights to the A-League.

Fox Sports have a deal to show the A-League until 2023, but would not stand in the way if another broadcaster was to take the struggling competition off its hands for the right price.

DAZN is expected to bid for the next round of rights to the Premier League in England, currently held by Sky Sports, BT and Amazon. Industry sources anticipate a bid for the Australian rights, too, which have been the domain of Optus Sport since 2016.

On Tuesday, Optus announced it had secured the rights for the 2020 Copa America, which the Socceroos have been invited to play in.

The A-League has suffered from an alarming decline in ratings on Fox Sports in recent years, but competition executives believe that is partly down to the migration of audiences to services like Kayo, while also touting strong digital engagement figures as proof of strong interest.

"Nobody is sitting here saying TV ratings going down is a good thing, and it doesn't matter. Nobody," the A-League's special advisor, former Premier League mastermind Richard Scudamore, told the Herald. "Irrespective of whether the game likes it or not, that's one of the key measures by which people measure success. But it's a stick with which people get to beat you by.

"Generally, if you look at the interest levels, the engagement levels, participation levels in the game, the viewership of other soccer products - there is interest here, and it is inevitable that if [the A-League club owners] get things right and I'm confident they're on a pathway to do that, this thing will turn and grow."

Peebles said "very competitive" pricing plans in Australia would be unveiled by DAZN in the coming weeks.