Chief executive Shay Segev confirms streamer plans to enter the race for the biggest prize in football broadcasting
London-based live streaming service DAZN will officially bid to buy the domestic broadcast rights to the Premier League in the UK. The group's chief exec has outlined plans to capture what is the most sought after rights package in British sports broadcasting.
The Premier League is currently available in the UK via traditional TV on Sky Sports and BT Sport, while a limited number of fixtures are broadcast exclusively by live streaming platform Amazon Prime Video.
However, DAZN could soon become the latest broadcaster to host the sport's most lucrative domestic league.
Would a DAZN win be good or bad news for British football fans?
To what extent a successful bid from DAZN would be welcomed by fans of the beautiful game in the UK is a complicated question.
Were DAZN to secure the exclusive rights to the league, this would likely bring down costs for Premier League fans, who are currently required to spend over £600 a year to guarantee access to as many games as possible, by subscribing to three different platforms.
As was illustrated in our widely discussed Premier League Price Index, UK fans are charged more than most when it comes to following their favourite teams. Due to the 3pm blackout, domestic fans are locked out of around half of the scheduled fixtures in the Premier League, while fans around the world can access every single match and often at much lower prices.
If DAZN wins the exclusive rights, fans would likely pay far less to just one live streaming service than they currently need to across various separate subscriptions for Sky Sports, BT Sport and Amazon.
However, there are concerns that DAZN would pick up only a limited number of fixtures, similarly to Amazon, which could add see fans forced to pay for yet another subscription in order to watch the Premier League.
On top of that, DAZN has come under fire many times in recent years in Italy, where it holds the exclusive domestic broadcast rights to the country's top flight Serie A. Technical difficulties, outages and other issues have seen the streamer attacked online by fans and even officially by government watchdogs over its coverage.
Taking complete control of the domestic rights to the Premier League would be a similarly huge undertaking and there would be understandable doubts among fans over DAZN's ability to manage that situation, given those hiccups in Italy.
DAZN hopes to become a 'big player' in the UK
Shay Segev, Chief Executive at DAZN, discussed the company's plans for the Premier League:
'Football is obviously very big in the UK and EPL is an option on our menu. If the question is do we have any ambition to go to this market, the answer is of course yes. And it's not only ambition it's a high priority on my list.DAZN is a sports service and clearly we will try to get bigger packages but the maths needs to work.
'The question is the economic situation, the competition and whether we will be in a position to be strong enough to position ourselves as the best. I am very, very confident that in the mid to long-term we can be a big player in the UK. Whether this takes, two years, five years, seven years, time will tell.'
Segev went on to discuss ideas for a new revenue-sharing approach to a deal with the Premier League, which the company hopes would increase revenues for both parties and reduce conflicts.
DAZN to prepare bid for upcoming Premier League rights auction
DAZN will now begin preparing their bid ahead of the rights auction which will take place next year and concern the broadcast rights to the Premier League seasons running from 2025/26 until 2027/28.
The Premier League generated £4.8bn from their latest rights deal, which they renewed with Sky, BT and Amazon, and runs from 2022 until 2025, an average of £1.66bn per season.
The league will no doubt want to consolidate or increase on that number, and DAZN could be one of the parties to help them do that.
However, there has been speculation that the Premier League may not want to spread their fixtures across as many as four broadcasters, meaning that one of Sky Sports, BT Sport or Amazon Prime Video would need to be replaced for any deal to work.
There is no official confirmation of this stance as yet, but it makes sense, given that most broadcast deals between football leagues and rights holders involve only one or two broadcasters. Three is already quite confusing and annoying for the consumer, and adding a fourth would surely be overkill.
One of the biggest topics likely to be discussed during the upcoming auction is average price faced by football fans, who are paying upwards of £600 a year to watch Premier League football as things stand.
Any increase on this is likely to see illegal live streaming skyrocket as fans are priced out of following their favourite teams. This is something the Premier League will certanily want to avoid going into this next rights auction.
We reached out to the Premier League for comment but they decided to "pass on this for the moment".
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