Sky and DAZN secure Serie A rights
Sky and DAZN have secured the domestic live TV rights to Serie A, the top flight of Italian club football, for seasons 2018/19, 2019/20 and 2020/21.
Sky acquired exclusive rights to broadcast 266 live games over the period while UK-based OTT platform DAZN snapped up multi-platform rights to 114 matches.
Sky’s deal will see matches shown on Saturdays at 3 pm and 6 pm, Sundays at 3 pm, 6 pm and 8.30 pm and Mondays at 8.30 pm. Matches will be made available via satellite, DTT (streamed via NOW TV) and fibre. Sky Q customers will also be able to watch the matches in UHD.
Under the terms of the new deal, Sky will pay around a third less for each exclusive match versus the current agreement.
At the same time, DAZN will make its first move into the Italian market after parent company Perform Group secured exclusive multi-platform broadcast rights to 114 Serie A matches. This will mark the first time that a pure live and on-demand streaming service has been awarded exclusive Serie A rights in Italy.
DAZN’s package includes the Saturday night match at 8.30 pm, and matches on Sunday at 12.30 pm and 3 pm, plus three exclusive games for every midweek round of fixtures. In addition, DAZN will show highlights of all games.
Discussing the Sky deal, Jeremy Darroch, group chief executive, Sky said: “With this agreement, we will be giving our customers in Italy more exclusive football than ever before. Alongside our recently announced plans for our Italian business, customers will be able to enjoy Sky on every single platform and access the content they love in ways that suit them. Taken together, we are confident we can reach even more sports fans in Italy, increasing our sports subscribers, and we have never been in a better position to grow.”
Serie A launched a new bidding round for this set of domestic rights earlier in June after cancelling a contract with Spanish media giant Mediapro.
James Rushton, CEO of DAZN, said of his company’s agreement: “The sport industry is ripe for disruption. Consumer behaviour has been transformed by technology, with streaming becoming the new norm for viewing content. DAZN suits the changing needs of today’s sports fans. Since launching almost two years ago, we have disrupted the industry in multiple markets as we change the way the world sees sport.
“DAZN is the world’s first pure sport OTT offer, which will do for sport what Netflix did for TV and what Spotify did for music.”
Serie A chairman Gaetano Micciche said that the combined deals are worth more than €973m per year.