DAZN signs ‘nine figure’ deal with Bellator MMA
DAZN has announced a five-year deal with Bellator MMA said to be worth well into nine figures. The deal calls for 22 Bellator events to be streamed each year on the OTT platform.
Perform Group’s sports streaming service DAZN (pronounced “Da Zone”) aims to be “The Netflix of Sports”. Currently available in Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Switzerland, DAZN is poised to enter the US OTT market with a comprehensive monthly subscription streaming fight package.
Towards that end, they recently signed a two-year minimum deal with an option for six more, with Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing, the #1 boxing promotion in the UK. Hearn said the deal calls for 16 US shows, four of them “absolute monsters”, plus the 16 shows he is already promoting in the UK, plus four or five shows he does on UK pay per view. In all the deal could be worth $1 billion. That is due to start in September.
Now DAZN has announced a five-year deal with Bellator MMA said to be worth well into nine figures, that’s $100 million for those Ugers short a few fingers. The deal calls for 22 Bellator events to be streamed each year on the OTT platform. 15 events will be broadcast on Viacom’s Paramount Network and simulcast on DAZN, while seven cards would be exclusively on DAZN.
Perform CEO Juan Delgado talked about it with Shlomo Sprung for Awful Announcing.
We are now going to corner the fight sports category in the U.S. with this Bellator partnership, said Delgado. It’s a big commitment from us. Viacom is very behind Bellator, and we’re going to continue to build the franchise and continue to build the fight sports category in the U.S.
Delago said the deal will “supercharge” the Bellator franchise.
We hope with this partnership, this investment, they are actually going to be a very clear competitor to UFC in terms of acquiring talent, in terms of the quality of fight cards they put together, and ultimately the fan base they build around the franchise,” he said.
We find Bellator to be an efficient set of rights, to not say anything sort of detrimental about our friends at Endeavor or IMG. It just happens to be that we were in parallel conversations and Bellator was willing to play ball. They got behind our vision that we’ve laid out in other markets and we’re laying out in the U.S. with DAZN and we got a deal done.
There will be no reality televisions shows or pre and post-fight shows of the traditional 22-minute television window.
This deal is about live fights, said Delgado. You have to cater to fans’ consumption patterns, which are now on their phone, mostly on the move, very short attention spans.”
We won’t reinvent sports broadcasting, but we will reinvent the way it’s distributed.”
The first MMA card will stream on September 29, and features ‘Rampage’ Jackson vs. Wanderlei Silva, a superfight between welterweight champion Rory MacDonald and middleweight champ Gegard Mousasi, and the beginning of the welterweight GP. Delgado has not determined how much the fight package will cost, but said it will be under $200 per year, which would put it in the $15 range, well above the $4.99 for the ESPN+ app that will begin airing UFC content in January 0f 2019.
