After the unexpected opportunity to hire the former ESPN President has already greatly benefitted the DAZN Group during private rights negotiations as recently evidenced by the company's $365 million - deal with Golden Boy Promotion, it has now started to leverage John Skipper's name to raise the brand awareness of the new sports streaming service in the U.S. by increasingly more public appearances. 🎤
Interestingly, the 62-year old media executive quickly changed his viewpoints on a lot of issues including rights acquisitions 💰 and the customer proposition of the traditional cable/satellite TV bundle 📺, having moved from a legacy media company to a digital-only disruptor in the sports broadcasting market. 🧐
After looking at these overarching developments, I tackled some specific statements of DAZN Group's Chairman that potentially provided a glimpse into the future of the OTT service in the 🇺🇸 United States - the world's largest, but also most competitive sports media market, including:
- Production of live events, 🎬
- DAZN's need for content exclusivity, 🙅🏼♂️
- Unavailability of sports rights in the United States, 🆘
- Impact of declining viewership in fragmented media landscape on DAZN's revenue model, 📉 and
- Difference between DAZN and other players in the new media space such as Facebook and Amazon. ☝🏼
DAZN's current offering in the United States looks pretty different compared to the company's other markets (🇩🇪🇦🇹🇨🇭🇮🇹🇨🇦🇯🇵) as competitors such as ESPN+ and B/R Live have already scooped up a lot of the available long-tail content that has traditionally been a hallmark of DAZN. This raises the question of how the digital-only player will complement its high-priced 🥊 boxing events going forward: The MLB and MLS seem to be in running. 👀