Bets, tickets, T-shirts… This is how Dazn wants to become a sports “cool app”.

On March 19th in conjunction with Match league between Barcelona and the real madridSports broadcasting platform Dozen He broke the record for live broadcast events in one day. In total, on Saturday that day OTT Radio management of 207 sporting events Globally—between football, basketball, boxing, American football, Formula 1, and tennis, among others—up to 90 of them happen simultaneously, in the group’s most demanding weekend since its launch seven years ago.

The broadcast of these hundreds of events is managed from a futuristic control room inside a glass-enclosed suburban office building Leeds (United Kingdom) which EXPANSIÓN was able to visit last week with a group of international journalists.

Where dozens of operators work in shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to ensure the correct broadcast of content. These workers are responsible for communicating with production teams on the floor, organizing commercial breaks, and making sure events run on time. In short, to make sure everything works.

This center houses the technological heart of Dazn. Opened in 2021, they receive content that platform users later watch in their app in the more than 200 markets in which the platform has a presence, manages and distributes them.

The building, which employs nearly 300 people, is connected by cable to the data centers group in London. To ensure emission safety, it has emergency generators and Twin center in Northern Ireland Which, in the event of a fall, controls the retransmission.

Just last year, the podium, dubbed netflix for sportsissued by 1.2 billion hours of content and 27,000 live events managed. A label they don’t get along with very much in the London group, admits the chief technology and product officer, Sandeep Tikobecause they consider their method of operation to be more complex than that of platforms such as Netflix.

“Netflix takes content and simply makes it available to its users. While we process something that’s happening live, we collect that moment and present it to consumers in real time. That’s the difference,” Tiku explains in quotes to this diary. “In addition, we give the user control. Because when they watch a game, they have the option to go back, advance or go live. Technically, it’s quite a challenge to be able to directly manage all of this,” he adds.

Cost-effectiveness

Tiku landed on Dazn in April last year from Entain, a multinational betting company that owns brands like bwin. The same company they signed from about a year ago The current CEO, Shay Segev.

The CEO, of Israeli descent, described himself as The main objective is to make the sports broadcasting group profitable and end their dependence on the billionaire Sir Leonard BlavatnikWhich invested more than 5,000 million dollars (about 4,500 million euros) in the loss-making company.

The bulk of this investment occurred in February last year when It pumped $4.3 billion into the platform to settle Dozen debts. The operation was carried out by Access Industries, the Blavatnik-owned industrial group that owns the majority of the shares in the platform.

To leave the red numbers behind, Segev signed the former CFO of Amazon Prime VideoAnd Darren Waterman, who joined as CFO in January last year. “In 2022 and this year, we have continued to invest, increase the sports rights portfolio, so we continue to take losses, but we have also significantly increased revenue. The goal is to be profitable by the end of this year.Or,” says Waterman.

Last year, Dazn raised its income to $2,300 million, up 70% compared to 2021. For this year, its CFO confirmed, the platform plans to close with Sales of $3.5 billion, 50% more. At the end of 2022, Dazn had more than 60 million registered users and 15 million subscribers.

Another task for the new CFO is to lead the company’s initial public offering, which, although it doesn’t have a set date yet, the director is confident will happen in the coming months when “market and business conditions are met.”

“super app”

To achieve these goals, the platform wants to go beyond broadcasting by becoming a kind of platform The ultimate sports app Where the user can go from watching his team’s match to betting or buying tickets and shirts. “We want to bring all of this together in one app, with one account, so fans have one place to go every day to enjoy sports,” Waterman explains.

Dazn and its big competitors face the same challenge: making online sports broadcasting a viable business. Rights are expensive, last a few years, and are usually region restricted. Meanwhile, the prices of streaming services are much lower than traditional cable TV, which makes it difficult to make a profit.

Hence, she chose the British group Introducing new revenue avenues and improving user experience So you spend more and more time on the app. To do this, they introduced new features such as group chats, where Dazn subscribers can comment on live matches – in Spain at the moment, this is only available for Real Madrid and Barcelona matches – and games, and options to change commentators.

“By adding more experiences and services, we intend to deliver more value to sports fans that we know are willing to pay more for,” says Waterman. “This will accelerate our ability to generate cash which we will use to deliver more content in more markets,” he adds.

Some of these new services, such as the betting platform Dozen house, already available in the UK, Spain and Italy. Others, such as the possibility to purchase merchandise and tickets, will be rolled out to the various markets in the coming months.

In the context of high inflation such as the current one, the price is another major factor. In Dazn they are no strangers and Waterman doesn’t rule out the possibility of offering some sort of low-cost or even free subscription plan in the future, funded by ads.