DAZNWithin Game Pass’s first year on DAZN’s platform, Berlinski said its global subscriber base grew 30%. Game Pass is on track for similar growth at the end of its second season, with Berlinski crediting features like its Fan Zone interactive chat, multiple-game viewing options, localized coverage of 18 games per week across seven languages, and even localized payment methods—with Brazil preferring prepaid debit cards to credit cards, for example.
But he also noted that some of Game Pass’s audience growth is a handoff of like-minded fans from soccer and boxing. In Germany, for example, announcers and ads during Bundesliga soccer matches watched by 2 million people at 2 p.m. have touted an upsell to DAZN’s Game Pass package to watch NFL broadcasts at 4 p.m. During the holidays, while promoting a heavyweight title fight between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury, DAZN offered a monthly NFL Game Pass for the equivalent of $0.99 to anyone who bought access to the fight.
“We’re taking a different marketing angle and thinking about how we serve different cohorts of customers, in terms of the avid fans, the casual fans, and then maybe someone who’s never watched NFL before,” Berlinski said. “How do we think about how we speak to them, how we price and package, and then how do we activate on the ground—those are all things that we’ve done around big moments in respective countries, which I think have gone a long way in helping us grow in those markets.”
Following the ball
Hiding in the 30% growth of Game Pass globally is robust regional growth that both DAZN and the NFL are watching with interest. Of the three markets where DAZN has seen Game Pass growth over 30%—Spain, Japan, and Italy—two are part of the league’s Global Markets Program.
