Streaming sports service DAZN is increasing the price of its monthly subscription in Spain right as the 2022-23 season of LaLiga is set to start.
New and existing customers will pay a little over $25 a month for the streaming service if they want to watch LaLiga soccer matches over the Internet, though the price drops to a little over $20 a month if they commit to a 12-month contract.
The move comes several months after DAZN announced it had secured the domestic streaming rights to LaLiga in Spain. It follows similar price hikes in Germany and Italy after DAZN secured streaming rights to live events there.
In the United States, LaLiga streaming rights are held by ESPN+, which operates as a joint venture between the Walt Disney Company and Hearst Television. Matches streamed by ESPN+ will be offered in both English and Spanish. In a statement last May, a LaLiga official said the United States was the most-important market for the soccer franchise outside of Spain.
Its home market remains the mother lode for LaLiga, and DAZN is hoping to cash in on it there after the company put up more than $5.4 billion to secure the multi-year streaming rights to those matches. As part of the deal, DAZN will exclusively offer at least five LaLiga matches every week, for a total of 175 over the next five years (LaLiga requires some matches to be offered on terrestrial and free-to-air satellite television).
At the time of the deal, a DAZN executive said securing the streaming rights to LaLiga represented "a strategic local investment for us in a key market, and is all part of the global momentum that we are driving across our business, which continues at pace."
"This is further proof that we are well past the tipping point in the migration of fans from viewing sports on linear pay TV, to streaming services," James Rushton, the chief executive of DAZN, said in a statement last year.
In addition to its regular tier of service — which also includes Premiere League, Formula 1 and Grand Prix motorcycle racing (MotoGP) — DAZN is also offering a LaLiga-only streaming plan that costs $13 a month with a one-year contract or a little over $19 a month without a commitment.
Launched in 2017, DAZN has quickly expanded to over 200 countries as it seeks to become one of the dominant streaming services focused on live and on-demand sports. Two years ago, research firm Kagan estimated DAZN had more than 7 million subscribers.