DAZN to stream majority of Women's Champions League group ...
DAZN has confirmed that all of this season’s Uefa Women’s Champions League group stage games will be streamed for free in the UK.
The sports media company also outlined that the majority of group stage fixtures will be streamed freely in other global territories excluding China and MENA. However, some matches will be restricted from YouTube in France, Germany and Spain.
DAZN further clarified that all group stage games up to and including matchday four will be shown on the company’s YouTube channel. Coverage is then to transition to the DAZN app and platforms into a freemium environment.
The sports streaming service had previously intended to put 42 of the competition’s 61 matches onto its subscription platform, with the remaining 19 fixtures, including the final, a semi-final and two quarter-finals, available for free on YouTube and its free-to-air (FTA) services.
According to an earlier report from Bloomberg, however, DAZN is undertaking a strategic review regarding its coverage of women’s soccer following the acquisition of content platform Ata Football, which has the US rights to competitions including France’s Division 1 Féminine and Italy’s Serie A Femminile.
The review will likely include weighing up the decision of implementing a paywall at this point in the partnership. The company’s then-global markets chief executive Veronica Diquattro said earlier this year that DAZN, alongside Uefa, had felt ‘the time is right for the competition to start finding its true commercial value’.
