Top DAZN exec reveals how the streamer is gearing up to super-serve fans in 2023, moving beyond boxing, and betting big on women's sports
- Len Blavatnik has invested billions to get sports streamer DAZN off the ground; it's now in 200 territories.
- DAZN is targeting women's sports for more investment and attention in 2023.
- The company's North American CEO, Joe Markowski, wants to deliver experiences alongside sports content.
The CEO, North America of sports streamer DAZN, Joe Markowski, has one of the toughest bosses in media. Access Industries CEO Len Blavatnik has spent billions launching this challenger brand in sports entertainment after seeing how streaming reversed the fortunes of corporate sibling Warner Music, where Blavatnik is vice chairman of the board.
While DAZN is already a force in parts of Asia, Europe and in Latin America, its North America presence is still mostly known for pay-per-view boxing. Working with chairman Kevin Mayer, the former Disney streaming chief, and global CEO Shay Segev, Markowski's DAZN is building a platform for sports in-between established global players such as Disney, Apple, Amazon, and Comcast — and on the domestic front CBS and Fox.
Markowski, who stepped up as CEO, North America in September after seven years at the company, told Insider he's betting on growth in women's sports, boxing, and Spanish-language programming. His vision of where things go at DAZN doesn't end with acquiring sports rights however — he sees sports encompassing the whole fan experience from streaming to betting and beyond.
Markowski's December interview with Insider has been condensed and edited for clarity.
DAZN is known for boxing. Where are things headed in 2023 and what are the bets in your business for longer term growth?
I think it's the expansion and the investment in our global platform, investing in content to broaden what we serve to consumers on a global basis. Our investment in women's sport is central to that.
We made a 10-year deal in 2014 with women's tennis to form WTA Media, which is a joint venture. We own the commercial rights along with the WTA for all the women's tennis. And we sell that content to ourselves and we sell it to other broadcasters around the world. We've got a legacy in investing in women's sport.
More recently we've acquired the UEFA Women's Champions League rights on a global basis. We've done that over four years, the first two years of which we've done in partnership with YouTube and Google. The purpose is to grow awareness of the property. Years three and four we will carry that content exclusively on DAZN. Women's soccer, in particular, is where we're investing to acquire the rights on a global basis. We believe it's foundational to our building.
We've also invested heavily in women's boxing. In late April of this year, for the first time in MSG's history two women headlined: Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano. It broke broadcast records globally. More than a million people watched that fight live on DAZN. You are starting to see real, meaningful growth in women's sport now and that comes in different forms.
I've mentioned broadcast [viewing] numbers. I could mention Adidas and EA Sports sponsoring DAZN's women's Champions League content in a really meaningful way on a global basis. I could mention the fact that in 2022, the top three most attended soccer games in Europe have been women's games.
So you're seeing real tangible, and intangible, growth metrics around the sport. Amongst my family and friends, who five years ago would not have been — on WhatsApp or in casual conversations in the pub or over a dinner table — talking about women's sport, they're now doing that.
The professionalism of the production in women's sport, we've been central to driving that forward. We are very happy to bring major investment via our rights fees and via the investments of our sponsorship partners to the sport that's long overdue recognition and compensation for women athletes. It's a circle: more investment, more interest, more eyeballs.
Spanish-language rights are a growth area for DAZN too. What can you tell us about what rights are out there or how you want to capitalize on that audience?
In the US, boxing fans in this country are disproportionately Hispanic relative to the wider population. Spanish-speaking people in the US love their boxing — Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Latin Americans more broadly, absolutely adore boxing.
Some of the leading boxers in the world come from those countries [in Latin America]. That means that our US business and customer base is heavily Spanish-speaking. They consume content on our platform in Spanish and in English. We see an opportunity to acquire Spanish language content to serve those guys with a broader range of local content. That could be soccer, boxing, and more fight sports.
So you've got Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, all competing for huge expensive sports rights. How do you conceive of a streamer that can enter that market and own a piece of it?
Well we conceived DAZN almost eight years ago, and we ended up launching in 2016. That was a long time before a lot of those guys were even considering streaming platforms.
So we saw an opportunity in a couple of markets where there was not much disruption from a broadcast perspective, where rights holders were getting a little bit frustrated by the lack of growth in the market. We saw an opportunity to disrupt and come in quickly and acquire major media rights in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Japan. They consistently came out at the top of our list, whatever way we cut the data.
We built a product, we brought on fantastic new technical and marketing and PR people. We leveraged our B2B relationships and rights holders that we'd established with [DAZN precursor] Perform Group, and [DAZN majority owner] Access Industries got access to major content packages, so that allowed us to launch the world's first pure play sports streaming platform. We have since launched North American businesses in Canada with NFL and Premier League and Champions League rights.
We launched in the US and Italy in 2018, Spain more recently, 2020. We have significant investments in nine media markets. We saw opportunities to leverage globally cleared rights and launch a global platform, and that allowed us to turn on the service or a version of the service in 200 plus markets and territories around the world.
The real business for us is the ongoing monthly subscription relationship that we have with boxing fans in this country, or soccer fans in Germany or Italy, and baseball fans in Japan.
And your vision is to deliver beyond being a sports broadcaster?
The way I see in our vision for the business going forward is you take the video subscription relationship you have with the sports fan, the boxing fan, the soccer fan, and you start patching together alongside that multiple different engagement touchpoints, monetization touchpoints to serve that fan with his or her fandom — be that sports betting, merchandise and ecommerce sales, interactions with other fans and athletes and teams, serving every aspect of their fandom in a very holistic way, making the platform a destination for all things sports fans want to do and see around their sport.
I would argue that the industry thus far has focused almost entirely on serving of live and on-demand content to the consumer. There's a lot more to being a sports fan than just watching the live game or watching the highlights. We want to build a destination platform that services all of the different things that sports fan wants — from when he, or she, wakes up all the way through the day until they go to sleep.
