In today’s media landscape, owning premium sports rights is only half the challenge. The real test is getting a return on that investment.
How to turn that audience into a trusted advertising inventory – across every screen, platform and viewing context?
In Spain, DAZN has partnered with Fifty5Blue to do exactly that.
DAZN has invested heavily in premium sports rights in recent years, building strong audiences around competitions such as Formula 1, LaLiga and MotoGP. Now, holding rights to the Football World Cup in the Spanish market, the scale of the opportunity becomes even greater.
The partnership between DAZN and Fifty5Blue is built around one clear objective: maximise the ad value by understanding who is watching, not just where they are watching.
A distribution model that needs unified measurement
DAZN is best known as a streaming platform, but its distribution model extends beyond its own app. To maximise reach, DAZN partners with other platforms to distribute World Cup content through their linear channels. That alone fragments the audience.
The World Cup then compounds it. Non-standard kick-off times. Increased social viewing. High levels of out-of-home consumption throughout the summer.
Without an independent, unified measurement, it becomes impossible to accurately measure all viewing. Audiences risk being duplicated, undercounted or missed entirely – reducing the commercial value of premium rights at the moment they matter most.
The solution: combining panel and first-party data
Fifty5Blue combines DAZN’s first-party data with its own panel to cut through this complexity.
This hybrid approach turns DAZN’s device-level data into people-based data, while deduplicating audiences across platforms and devices. The panel also adds demographic profiling, co-viewing insight across screens and visibility into viewing beyond DAZN’s own platform.
The Spain–Portugal match illustrates why this matters.
Most of the viewing still happened on the big screen, accounting for 93.7% of total viewing. Looking one layer deeper on that TV viewing, the data shows how audiences are distributed across DAZN’s viewing environments: 63.6% of viewing came through DAZN’s linear TV channel, while 30.1% came through its own streaming platform.
The data also shows why panels remain essential. Viewing behaviour differs significantly by platform and device. Connected TVs generated the highest level of co-viewing, with an average of 1.71 people watching, compared with 1.52 for linear TV and 1.26 for mobile.
First-party data can measure devices, but only panel measurement can translate those signals into people, revealing the true size and value of the audience.
For DAZN, this means no viewer is left unmeasured or unmonetised, backed by independent validation.
For agencies and advertisers, it provides greater confidence in the scale, quality and reach of their investments.
Higher investment, higher expectations
Spain’s World Cup viewing story will be a clear example of how premium live sport now operates across converged environments.
DAZN has already proven this hybrid measurement approach in Spain across Formula 1, LaLiga and MotoGP. The World Cup raises the stakes further. The same methodology is applied here.
When the investment is high, independent and people-based measurement is no longer optional. It becomes the key for commercial success.