SVG Sit-Down: DAZN’s Zander Berlinski on the Quick International Success of NFL Game Pass

The streaming company has helped the NFL grow its presence overseas

A major goal of the NFL this season has been international expansion. That’s evident by the increasing number of regular-season games played outside the U.S. This season, the league played five games off U.S. soil: one in Brazil, three in London, and another in Berlin.

With that international reach naturally came a rethinking of the league’s overseas live-media rights and distribution. In the second year of a 10-year deal, the NFL relies on DAZN as distributor of live game coverage through add-on streaming product NFL Game Pass. Purchasing NFL Game Pass, DAZN subscribers get full access to every NFL game — regular season, playoffs, and the Super Bowl — making it a linchpin of the league’s global ambitions.

SVG sat down with Zander Berlinski, SVP, strategy and business development, DAZN Group, to discuss the product’s success since the NFL’s international product migrated to its platform, what viewing tendencies he has noticed in international markets, and why this is an exciting trend for sports leagues of all sizes.

What are the highlights for DAZN in regard to the NFL Game Pass project?
It has been really good. We took over the product at the beginning of last season and grew the subscriber base over 30%, which was a great first-year result. We had a bunch of success on attracting new fans to the platform. From that perspective, this year is off to a similar year-over-year growth rate, which is great.

A couple key things have been very exciting from our perspective: innovating from a product perspective and bringing new features and benefits to customers to go beyond the streaming experience.

This year, we launched the Ultimate tier, sort of a second tier of the product. With it, you get certain benefits from a streaming perspective, whether that be UltraHD (when available) or Dolby 5.1 audio, and you also get certain benefits beyond the core streaming experience.

I think both DAZN and the NFL were excited about using the power of our platform and tech to create an experience that moves toward becoming sort of a digital home for an NFL fan internationally in all the various touchpoints that they want to engage with.

We launched NFL Game Pass on Amazon channels in six markets this season, which has helped increase the exposure of the product to reach new fans and allow them to watch it where they want to. Also, holistically, distribution — all the platforms we are on — was one of the main reasons the NFL wanted to come to DAZN, which was a significant increase relative to where they were. We continue to add platforms, and we’re quite distribution-agnostic as a company.

How important are the NFL’s international games for you and the product?
From a key-moments perspective, international games are a really big moment for us because they become cultural moments and go beyond the avid diehard NFL fan. It starts to engage the broader sports audience in those markets.

The Brazil game being added this year in Week One was a great one. Obviously, London and Germany, as always, were great, and the number of those games will increase in future years. We’re excited about that.

The other big moments tend to correlate with the overall NFL calendar. Thanksgiving, granted it is a U.S. holiday, has appeal internationally from an NFL-calendar perspective, given the focus on the matchups and the three games being on Thursday in a good time zone for most of the main European audience.

Have any regions or markets where the NFL hasn’t physically visited yet surprised you in their interest in NFL Game Pass?
We’ve seen good uptake in Mexico. They’ve had a game there in the past, and the league may try to go back there in the future, but Mexico has been really strong.

To your point, where we’ve also seen strength — I think this correlates not necessarily to NFL interests but also speaks to some of the broader strategic narratives of why they wanted to come into DAZN — is in our core markets. Those are markets like Japan, Italy, Spain, where we own the core domestic broadcast for a lot of the Tier 1 sports. In Germany, we have Bundesliga and Champions League; in Japan, we have the J League and a good portion of their domestic baseball teams. We promote pretty heavily to those users and give, in certain instances, special promotions through CRM or on platform.

I think the scale of our base internationally was one of the main reasons the NFL wanted to come do this partnership with us. They had done a very good job over eight-10 years building a platform that, on an independent basis, found a lot of the diehard NFL fans who were seeking it out, but, to get to the next level of growth, they felt it would be difficult to grow on a pure standalone basis. Inside a broader sports ecosystem, where we have millions of subscribers on the app each day, we can promote the app. That was a quite appealing part of the partnership.

Speaking broadly, what have you learned about international consumers of the NFL that is different from those who have grown up with the NFL in the U.S.?
It’s interesting. I think there are probably a couple different cohorts that you can think about. There is a cohort that is quite similar to the U.S. audience. Those are diehard fans, whether expats who live abroad or people who grew up following the game because of a relative. Those fans were on the product already when we migrated it or are coming in Day 1 of the season. They’re getting the product because they want to make sure they don’t miss every game or the games of a specific team. With those fans, RedZone is a massive pull as well, and they behave fairly similar to what I’d say U.S. fans do.

I think what’s magnified internationally is, there’s more of a cohort of casual fans and there’s an effort for us to think about how we bring someone along from either no exposure to the NFL or some casual exposure and move them into a more engaged customer. One of the things we did this year is launch a free Game of the Week, where we put one game in front of the paywall and use it as a sampling for both our free subscriber base and paid DAZN subscribers who don’t have NFL Game Pass.

Alongside that, we have started to add more original content. We do a weekly podcast show with influencers internationally. We did an influencer watch-along during Thanksgiving where [influencers] were commenting on the games as they were watching.

All of those things are aimed at taking people who are clearly sports fans — whether that be soccer, rugby, or others — but maybe are not engaged with the NFL to the extent where they might purchase a product and move them along to becoming an avid fan.

Zooming out, the NFL is obviously a massive use case, but, as American sports leagues of all sizes look to grow their international presence, how has streaming changed overseas rights and how those are viewed, even versus just a handful of years ago?
I think it’s a trend that has emerged as more and more content has shifted into a streaming environment. More parties can operate on either a multi-territory or a global basis. DAZN is one of the few [media companies] that operate in 200+ markets around the world. That gives us a unique ability to leverage our technology and scale and offer these rights on a global — or at least on a many-countries — basis.

As you start to see more and more content leave the traditional linear-cable bundle, I think it’ll become more and more common for rights to be sold maybe not on a full-global basis; more deals will become multi-territory. We’re in favor of those types of deals, and I think our NFL deal is a good example of what we want to try to do moving forward.

International represents, I think, a big growth area from a media-rights perspective and a fan-growth perspective.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.