TORONTO — Football fans across Canada should soon be able to include NFL Sunday Ticket in their cable or satellite subscriptions again, after live sports streaming service DAZN Canada announced Tuesday it has entered into distribution agreements with Bell, Rogers, Shaw, SaskTel and other cable/satellite providers to carry NFL Sunday Ticket this upcoming season.
Mid-summer last year, cable and satellite providers in Canada were no longer able to offer NFL Sunday Ticket to their residential subscribers after DAZN Canada bought the rights to distribute all out-of-market NFL games on its streaming service and launched its NFL Game Pass subscription offering. TV carriers in Canada were still able to offer NFL Sunday Ticket to their commercial subscribers, as the Canadian carriers retained the rights to serve bars, restaurants and other commercial clients.
Now DAZN Canada says its partnerships with Canadian cable and satellite TV providers will give Canadian football fans more choice on how they watch NFL games.
“We are happy to be partnering with Canadian cable providers to give Canadian NFL fans more choice when it comes to their viewing experience,” said Joseph Markowski, senior vice-president, revenue, at DAZN, in a news release. “We are proud of the progress we’ve made since our launch last summer, including adding some top-notch sports properties to our offering and substantial platform improvements that fans will notice and enjoy. We are also excited to be adding even more sports programming in the coming weeks, all at the low-cost Canadians have come to expect from us.”
Last September, when DAZN Canada began streaming the first games of the NFL’s 2017/2018 season, NFL Game Pass subscribers began complaining about technical issues with DAZN’s streaming service, as reported by the Globe and Mail. Presumably DAZN’s “substantial platform improvements” have since addressed some of those problems.
Details regarding how NFL Sunday Ticket will be carried by the various cable and satellite TV providers in Canada and how much the package will cost have not been released officially. However, a post on the Rogers Community Forums suggests it will be available on both Rogers’s Digital TV and Ignite TV platforms as a standalone package for $199.99 for the entire season. SaskTel also lists NFL Sunday Ticket as a $199 onetime-fee premium sports package on its website.
In its news release, DAZN Canada said it remains “the only place for Canadians to watch every single live NFL game through NFL Game Pass including pre-season, regular season and post-season anytime, anywhere, plus exclusive access to NFL RedZone.”
Access to DAZN Canada’s live sports streaming platform costs $20 per month or $150 per year with the first month free for new subscribers.
