Editor Note: ‘Early Entrants’ is a series of sports business ‘rumblings’ before the news breaks.
The NFL’s decision not to opt-out of its $1.5 billion/year Sunday Ticket deal with AT&T means that DAZN is likely be without NFL games (in the U.S.) until at least 2022 (when the current pact expires), but JohnWallStreet has heard from multiple sources that the upstart OTT streaming service is not expected to get the valuable content then, either. Comcast – which could run the product on either NBC Sports Gold or their Peacock product – and Discovery Communications (see: existing relationship with league) are thought to be the favorites to take down the Sunday Ticket package during the next round of rights negotiations.
Recent reports indicating that DAZN was in search of “at least $500 million” to support expansion and the purchase of new broadcast rights led many to assume that the company would make an offer for Sunday Ticket that would have been difficult for the NFL to resist, but industry insiders say there is another asset, in another league, that makes more sense. “The un-televised mid-week EPL games (which are not currently sold to protect lower level clubs) are widely more popular around the world on a programming basis and will generate significantly more subs than Sunday Ticket would.”
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