“Negotiations with Digi are progressing normally” says CEO of Dazn
The CEO of Dazn Portugal, a branch of the UK-based on-demand sports streaming service, Jorge Pavão de Sousa, says that negotiations with Digi, an electronic services operator in Europe, with operations in Romania, Spain, and Italy, are going according to plan after a difficult start to the operation in Portugal. Negotiations with Portugal’s main telecoms companies are also “going well”.
Jorge Pavão de Sousa told business daily Negócios that Dazn has a policy of talking to all the distributors in each market and has done so with Digi.
He also said that the company had a partnership relationship with the current distributors in Portugal (Meo, Nos, Nowo and Vodafone) to negotiate agreements.
The Dazn CEO said that Digi would be a new player in the market, in accordance with what each company wants, and the synergies that can be identified from a business leverage point of view.
On the company’s rivalry with Sport TV, Jorge Pavão de Sousa, said, “I think we should have more discussion. Probably, in the last 12 months, there has not been as much dialogue as would be advantageous for both parties. But they are good competitors that force us to continuously innovate our portfolio of content that allows us to compete with the competition. But I think there are a number of areas that we should be working on in a more integrated way”.
For example, he was baffled as to why each company spoke for itself on questions such as piracy rather than acting together since “piracy is our main competitor”.
“We should also talk about resource optimisation strategies from the point of view of video and image capture of the competitions on which we are currently going to work together”, he said.
Earlier this year Dazn ousted Sport TV as the Formula 1 rights holder in Portugal through 2027.
The global sports streaming service acquired rights to motor racing’s Formula 1 (F1) series in Portugal for the next three seasons with the deal covering the 2025, 2026, and 2027 campaigns.
