Source : THE AGE NEWS
Soon to be Australia’s biggest sports broadcasting company, DAZN wants to become the “Netflix of sports”. There’s just one problem, Netflix wants that title too.
Already the world’s largest media company by market capitalisation, Christmas Day marks the global streaming giant’s next big step into sports broadcasting.
Patrick Mahomes and his Kansas City Chiefs will feature on Netflix’s foray into live NFL broadcasting.Credit: Getty Images
While still early days for Netflix’s live-streaming credentials, it will broadcast two NFL games this year (early on Boxing Day for Australians). Super Bowl champions the Kansas City Chiefs face the Pittsburgh Steelers before the Baltimore Ravens visit the Houston Texans. What’s more, Grammy award-winning artist Beyoncé will perform at half-time in Houston.
Already cash rich, the NFL is the biggest sport in the biggest media market in the United States, though it was super-sized yet again when pop star Taylor Swift went public with her new boyfriend, Chief star Travis Kelce.
If it works well, Netflix may continue fast-forwarding its live sports strategy and begin to scoop up more sporting rights to broadcast to its 283 million subscribers globally.
Unlike many traditional media companies, Netflix has enjoyed the luxury of having a mountain of cash to try and test different sports with its audiences rather than dive head-first into costly contracts.
Netflix is still testing the waters as a company explicitly self-defined as pro-profit.
It began with documentary-style dramatisations of major sporting events. The Drive to Survive series is widely considered to have pushed Formula One racing further into the mainstream and grown its reach among female audiences. Racing is no longer just reserved for petrol-heads.
It also produced similar programming for the PGA Golf Tour, the NBA, NFL and less successfully the ATP tennis tour, which was cancelled after two seasons.
Now, it is building up its portfolio across a number of live sports. The celebrity boxing fight between YouTuber Jake Paul and former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson was viewed by 60 million households last month. The fight suffered some buffering and issues, but Netflix says it is ready for Christmas.
At the weekend, it scooped up the US rights for the 2027 and 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cups, its biggest push into sports so far. But it is still testing the waters as a company self-defined as pro-profit.
Netflix turned up the drama on Formula One docu-series Drive to Survive.
Among its streaming rivals, Apple TV+ signed a 10-year, $US2.5 billion ($4 billion) deal to become the official broadcaster of Major League Soccer in America in 2022.
Amazon Prime, perhaps the biggest new-age competitor to Netflix in this domain, has leant heavily into sports. Having had a hit with behind-the-scenes NFL series All or Nothing, it is a broadcaster of both Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. Like Netflix, Amazon has the rights to a limited amount of NFL games. It will also broadcast NASCAR races from 2025, recently took out a portion of the NBA’s new 12-year rights deal, and airs some English Premier League matches.
Locally, it made waves when becoming the official broadcaster of all ICC matches in Australia from 2024 to 2027, with last year’s Cricket World Cup shown exclusively on Amazon Prime Video.
Unlike most major nations, Australia’s anti-siphoning legislation means far stricter laws protect our biggest sports from disappearing behind the paywall of a global streaming firm.
Those laws were updated this year but didn’t include an amendment for digital streaming rights, meaning when the next major round of negotiations takes place – such as the NRL, for instance – a streaming company, or the likes of Foxtel, could put a price on streaming for viewers.
For now, unlike its competitors, Netflix wants to stream major one-off events, rather than committing to a nightly schedule of sports broadcasting.
But its top executives have made significant U-turns before, such as swearing off ever introducing ads to the platform before rolling out an ad tier in 2022. Live sports are also a major reason for that push. Last month Netflix said it completely sold out its advertising inventory for the Christmas match-ups.
So for a company roughly double the size of Disney in terms of market capitalisation, it could just be the beginning.
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