Earlier this year, Joe Markowski, EVP North America of sports streaming service DAZN, announced that the platform was on the “on the positive side” of 4 million subscribers around the world. Now it seems the streaming service has seen a tremendous amount of growth as CNBC is reporting that its currently at eight million subscribers, with 90 percent of those coming from outside the U.S.
DAZN’s numbers are more than double those of ESPN+, which reached 3.5 million paid subscribers at the end their fourth quarter. The service more than tripled in the last year when the company announced that their OTT had reached 1 million subscribers last September. Much of the growth seems attributed to the addition of UFC to ESPN+, which premiered in January. After seven years with Fox, UFC signed a $150 million per year rights deal with ESPN to air events on their linear channel and streaming service.
The growth of DAZN is attributed to the high demand of boxing here in the U.S., while soccer is pulling the numbers for the platform overseas, according to CNBC. In October, DAZN announced a partnership with Pluto TV in which they brought the “DAZN Fight Zone” to the ad-supported streaming service. The DAZN Fight Zone is a three-hour weekly programming block that features combat sports, including archived classic fights, DAZN-produced original shows and programming specials like “40 Days: Canelo vs. Kovalev.”
In September, DAZN also announced it will be available on Xfinity Flex, Comcast’s recently launched streaming device — and on their X1 set-top box starting October.