Pomegra
DAZN's acquisition of EverPass Media brings exclusive NFL Sunday Ticket commercial venue rights to the UK streamer, with TKO and the NFL taking minority stakes in DAZN.
- EverPass, founded in 2023 by RedBird Capital Partners and 32 Equity (the NFL's venture capital arm), holds commercial distribution rights to NFL Sunday Ticket for bars, hotels, and restaurants across the U.S.
- RedBird Capital Partners, 32 Equity, and TKO Group Holdings become minority shareholders in DAZN as part of the deal structure.
- EverPass rebrands as DAZN for Business; CEO Alex Kaplan retains leadership of the unit and takes on a broader role within DAZN.
Lead
DAZN, the London-based sports streaming group, announced on August 26, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire EverPass Media, a U.S. commercial venue distribution platform created just three years ago. Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal delivers to DAZN something it could not easily build from scratch: a functioning U.S. rights and infrastructure pipeline that feeds live sports into more than a million bars, restaurants, and hotels, anchored by exclusive commercial distribution rights to NFL Sunday Ticket.
What Does EverPass Actually Do?
EverPass is not a consumer streaming app. It is the middleman between major rights holders and the commercial venue industry - the technology and sales layer that ensures a sports bar can legally stream a Sunday afternoon NFL game on its screens. Founded in 2023 by RedBird Capital Partners and 32 Equity, the NFL's own venture capital arm, EverPass holds commercial distribution rights to a broad slate of U.S. sports properties: NFL Sunday Ticket, English Premier League, UEFA Champions League, MLB, NBA, WNBA, NASCAR, PGA TOUR, MLS, Formula 1, and college football and basketball. It also aggregates live sports content flowing through Peacock, Netflix, Paramount, and Apple for the venue market. In July 2026, EverPass extended its reach further by signing a new distribution agreement with DirecTV to carry NFL Sunday Ticket via satellite and streaming to commercial customers.
That portfolio makes EverPass a concentrated bet on the commercial venue segment - a market that consumer streaming platforms have historically underserved because the unit economics, rights negotiations, and technical requirements differ sharply from residential distribution.
Why Would DAZN Pay for This?
DAZN has built its consumer sports streaming business across Europe, Latin America, and Japan. The U.S. has remained a gap. Breaking into American sports rights at the consumer level is prohibitively expensive - the NFL, NBA, and MLB have locked long-term deals with incumbent broadcasters and well-capitalized streamers. The commercial venue channel is a side door. EverPass already holds the rights; it already has the venue relationships; it already has the infrastructure. DAZN absorbs all of that, avoids a multi-year rights bidding war, and immediately has a viable U.S. business.
The equity structure reinforces the strategic logic. By bringing in RedBird Capital Partners, 32 Equity, and TKO Group Holdings as minority shareholders in DAZN itself, the company aligns incentives with the NFL's own investment arm and with TKO, which controls WWE and the UFC. That web of minority stakes is less a financial arrangement than a rights access play: parties with content DAZN wants are now parties with equity they want to see appreciate.
What Does This Mean for Venues and Competitors?
For bars and restaurants, the operational change is marginal in the short term. EverPass-branded services rebrand to DAZN for Business, but Kaplan's team remains intact. The longer-term implication is more structural. A DAZN-backed venue platform with TKO content in its orbit has the capital and relationships to push further into premium live events - potentially boxing, UFC, and WWE - that are already part of DAZN's consumer catalog.
For existing commercial venue distributors, the acquisition signals that the segment is drawing serious capital. The days of fragmented, small-scale licensing arrangements for commercial venues are contracting.
Outlook
The deal consolidates two previously separate strategic visions - DAZN's global streaming ambition and EverPass's domestic venue infrastructure - into a single U.S. vehicle. Whether DAZN can extract scale from the EverPass platform depends on how aggressively it bundles venue rights with its broader content library and whether the NFL relationship, now formalized through 32 Equity's minority stake, opens doors to expanded commercial terms down the road. Kaplan's continued leadership provides operational continuity. The financial terms remaining undisclosed make it difficult to assess whether DAZN paid a fair price, but the rights package it is absorbing has no obvious comparable on the market.
