Canadians are unhappy with the new streaming solution for the very popular NFL games, writes Peter Vogel. (Pexels.com)
In late August I had intended to write a column on a new venture promising to deliver televised sports content via an Internet streaming solution.
A couple of paragraphs were drafted, with a view to writing the full column once the service was up and running.
Here in Canada the new kid on the block is DAZN (pronounced dah zone, as in an athlete who is “in the zone” and focused on the particular play or the game as a whole).
DAZN has taken the NFL rights here away from the established networks for the NFL Sunday Ticket package and it is launching a streaming-only solution at $20 a month. That puts it quite a way below what was being charged previously for full NFL coverage here on standard cable TV. These boys appear to have deep pockets and they are international. DAZN bills itself as the Netflix of sports.
Fast forward a couple of months. DAZN has become a case study for how not to roll out a new product or service, and the company has become as reviled in Canada as was Target for its inept understanding of the Canadian marketplace.
There is a lot of finger pointing and certainly more than enough blame to share among multiple parties but it is clear that the DAZN people were simply unprepared to deliver a high-quality product and service and that they had underestimated the Canadian NFL fan.
How so you may ask? After all, Netflix delivers a completely reliable streaming movie and TV show service, a service that has only had the occasional outage. What could possibly go wrong with a streaming TV sports service?
For starters, how about not being able to view games at all because the service couldn’t handle the demand? How about poor picture quality because the service couldn’t deliver the frame rate required for a TV-quality image? How about buffering and pixellating issues that led to portions of games simply not being seen? How about audio dropout?
How about the time delay inherent in streaming content? When you watch a movie on, say Netflix, you don’t care much about the 30 seconds or even longer that it takes to get the first bits of streamed content onto your TV screen. However, when you are watching live sports you expect the coverage to be “live,” not minutes behind the actual action on the field or on the ice.
It seems that many football viewers are also active bettors on in-game play action. Such betting can’t work when the streamed game is several minutes behind the live action.
Simply put, just about everything has gone wrong with the DAZN rollout, and now, a couple of months or so in, the company has had to grovel before the established cable companies and ask them to carry some or all of the content that they did previously.
Whether or not DAZN can recover from this fiasco remains to be seen. Some customers have received rebates but that may not be enough.
The real mystery here is how the NFL, for all its technical prowess, could take away rights to one of its most valuable properties from established telcos and award them to what appears to be an amateurish outfit. Certainly the end product has been anything but professional.
Where was the due diligence to see if this UK company could actually deliver on its promises? And a five-year contract? For an unproven system?
Even as late as the end of October, the DAZN service was generating negative press on Twitter. Here are several examples. From @TKRadnStuff: “rough day ... super choppy, audio issues, etc. I just had my internet triple checked - it's not me it’s you.” From @Born2Run: “ is there a reason that the video is 10 seconds behind the audio?” And from @DAZN_CA_Help: “@Niely_CP31_Habs Please send us an inquiry ... so we can discuss compensation details with you.”
User @WendellWaldron sums up his frustrations: “DAZN lost a third of their subscribers. That's why their complaints are down. Less customers, less complaints. Still struggling to deliver.”
Seems there’s nothing quite like professional sports to bring out hyperbole, as in this, from @AntonucciJordan: “@DAZN_CA you guys have ruined so many lives.”
Long-time football fan and coach Tony Howie says he had the NFL Sunday Ticket package through Shaw for several years and never had an issue. However he’s having second thoughts about DAZN.
“I heard the cable companies might get the service back, but I cut off TV cable in the summer in order to use streaming services. Our cable bill was out of hand for minimal service, and we rarely watch TV. I had kept it just for college and pro football, so DAZN seemed to solve that issue. $20 is significantly better than what I was paying for cable. If DAZN doesn’t get fixed, I may have to resort to internet radio … which I don’t actually mind. Most team sites offer a live streaming radio feed for fans in other markets.”
Another local fan, Brian Briones, is willing to cut DAZN some slack, saying the $20 a month, or $150 a year, fee is good value, especially if the company can add other major league sports to its lineup.
For now, however, DAZN is a tarnished brand in Canada. It will take considerable effort to regain broad market acceptance here, if indeed that is possible.
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