DAZN has agreed to acquire EverPass Media, the commercial sports distribution business that holds exclusive rights to deliver NFL Sunday Ticket to bars, restaurants, hotels and casinos in the United States. The deal, announced on 26 August, will see EverPass rebranded as DAZN for Business, with financial terms undisclosed. As part of the transaction, 32 Equity, the NFLs strategic investment arm, RedBird Capital Partners and TKO Group Holdings all become minority shareholders in DAZN itself.
EverPass was formed in 2023 by 32 Equity and RedBird specifically to build an internet-delivered alternative to satellite distribution in the out-of-home market, a segment DirecTV had controlled for three decades. It took full exclusive control of the Sunday Ticket commercial package for the 2026 season, then signed a supply agreement with DirecTV for Business in July to keep the product available to venues that had not migrated to streaming. Alongside the NFL package, EverPass aggregates commercial-venue rights spanning the Premier League, the UEFA Champions League, Major League Baseball and the NBA, through arrangements with ESPN, Amazon, Peacock, Paramount and Apple. Alex Kaplan remains chief executive of the business under DAZN ownership.
The structure is the most instructive part of the transaction. Rather than sell EverPass for cash and exit, the NFL and its co-investors have converted a domestic distribution asset into equity in a global streaming platform. That is a meaningful shift in how leagues think about the distribution layer: the NFL is no longer simply licensing rights to a buyer; it is taking a position in the buyers balance sheet and, by extension, in the international expansion that DAZN is funding. For DAZN, which has spent the past six months acquiring streaming technology company ViewLift, striking team-level agreements with the Minnesota Timberwolves and Indiana Pacers, and taking exclusive local streaming rights across seven franchises through Gotham Sports, EverPass supplies the one thing its direct-to-consumer app could not: a business-to-business revenue line with contracted, recurring venue subscriptions that do not churn like retail sports subscriptions do.
The wider consequence is that out-of-home viewing is now being priced and traded as its own rights category rather than bundled into residential deals. Commercial venues pay substantially more per screen than households, the inventory is scarce, and the customer relationships are annual contracts rather than month-to-month. Other rights holders will read this as a template for splitting their own commercial packages away from consumer distribution and selling them separately. It also further isolates DirecTV, which has now been reduced from owner of the commercial Sunday Ticket relationship to a reseller of someone elses product. For ESPN, Amazon and the other platforms whose content EverPass aggregates, the acquisition creates a single, well-capitalised gatekeeper to the American commercial venue market, one in which their most important supplier, the NFL, is also a shareholder.
