DTVE Interview: Hannah Brown, Co-CEO of DAZN Women’s Sport

The FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 broke broadcasting and streaming records across the globe. According to data compiled by quality assurance specialist NPAW Solutions, streaming numbers of the tournament rose by 20%. Its impact and the overall growing interest in women’s football saw sports streaming giant DAZN launch its Women’s Sport division last year. 

Hannah Brown (Source: DAZN)

Since entering the women’s football market ahead of the launch, DAZN has built a strong portfolio of rights including the UWCL, WSL, Liga F, Frauen Bundesliga, Saudi Women’s Premier League, Serie A Feminine, D1 Arkema, NWSL and other domestic leagues.

To spearhead the new unit, the streamer appointed Hannah Brown and Esmeralda Negron as co-chief executive officers, who had started off as flatmates before founding the DAZN-acquired company – ata football.

Brown who had worked a total of nine years at Sky Sports and was previously chief strategy officer at sports streamer Fubo from 2018 through to 2020, launched ata football with former footballer, Negron. Prior to being brought and integrated into the company in August 2023, ata football delivered premium live and curated women’s football content of its various sport properties to viewers via streaming

She tells DTVE the company was designed to be a kind of a “prototype media platform focused on the US market”, with rights to some of the major European women’s football leagues across Spain, France, and Germany, among more.

“The strategy from the outset was to aggregate together a set of sports rights,” says Brown, commenting on the formation of the women’s sport department.

“We recognise that women’s football was kind of accelerating in terms of interest and DAZN wanted to play their part in how women’s football was distributed and marketed,” she adds.

The DAZN exec explains since the launch, where the company’s focus was on leveraging its technology for its multi-market paid offering, more efforts are being put into the launch of a freemium model, by acquiring data to drive audience growth and engagement as well as expanding its advertising reach.

She says: “Growing that technical development around the free platform was obviously really critical about how we were thinking about the women’s football portfolio, because putting rights onto a social media platform is lovely in terms of reach and to some extent engagement, but it’s very difficult to build a really meaningful relationship with that audience and grow your own commercial business.”

DAZN has recently joined forces with digital payment provider Visa on an on-platform fan activation partnership covering knockout stages of UEFA Women’s Champions League on the streaming service.

The DAZN FanZone functionality includes interactive features such as quizzes, live chat, and viewer polls – allowing fans to engage with the content and each other in real-time.

The streamer said the social and interactive elements add further dimension to the coverage, fostering a sense of community among women’s football audiences.

The project will focus on encouraging participation and engagement around the women’s game and providing fans with a fan community-led broadcast experience, says DAZN.

Free offering

At the start of the year, DAZN tested that freemium model, by lifting the paywall of its Women’s Football offering for viewers in the UK and was also extended to other key markets. It came as part of the streamer’s campaign advocating for the growth and investment of women’s football.

Although the move to deliver free coverage of women’s football to viewers is still in its early days, Brown reports the response has been positive and has seen an “uptick in registrations”.

She says: “With the Euros and World Cups, we all recognise the importance of these kind of temple moments, that puts it on the agenda of our mums and dads and pals in the street who maybe previously or normally don’t get involved or engaged in this stuff.”

However, Brown urges rather than just drawing more eyes to major live sports events that may occur every couple of years or football matches featuring popular clubs, consistent engagement is what DAZN is aiming for.

“Being aware of something is different to actively seeking something out to watch,” she says. “We can potentially get excited about England. We might get excited about some big matches of our favourite clubs, but week in week out engagement is the next step in really driving long term avidity.”

In 2021, DAZN partnered with YouTube to broadcast the UEFA Women’s Champions League on the youth-skewed video platform for free globally, covering the seasons from 2021-25. In March 2023, the streamer recorded over 20 million views on its YouTube channel for the group stages of the football tournament.

Brown cites its biggest audiences for it’s free DAZN Women’s Football YouTube channel are across the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the US. She says 25% of viewers are watching via the YouTube app on their TVs.  Hence, the company recognised there was an opportunity to shift those audiences to the DAZN platform.

“We think we can convert that audience to our app as long as our app is well distributed and is on their Samsung or their Apple TV or whatever it might be…so that’s really the bedrock of the strategy,” she continued. “Free gives us a good opportunity to convert across a much bigger audience to the women’s game and allow them to engage day in, day out. And then the bit which is early stages, but where we see a big development opportunity is once you have a free proposition.”

Strategy plans

Beyond football, Brown says the group are looking at a wider range of sport content that will be suitable for its free offering. DAZN currently holds rights to Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and FIBA Women’s Basketball across a range of markets.

She notes, “you want to have that right platform, when that breakthrough moment comes, you’ve to have the right environment to really capture, engage and then to clearly drive value out of that audience.”

“But how we use those capabilities to market and to merge rights holders for this kind of concept of a destination, building a database, driving acquisition of customers to free ­ — where you get to know who they are and have enriched commercial partnerships is a huge focus for us,” she adds.