DAZN’s CFL streams will feature ‘unique voice,’ new broadcast crew

Graphic courtesy: DAZN

Saturday night CFL broadcasts will have their own distinct look and feel beginning in 2027, thanks to the addition of a new media rights partner.

Vice president of DAZN Canada, Deidra Dionne, confirmed in an exclusive interview with 3DownNation that the streaming service will self-produce Saturday Night Football, after acquiring the rights to broadcast the weekly tentpole game in a landmark deal with the CFL. While much remains undetermined about how those streams will look, they won’t mirror the existing TSN broadcasts and will feature their own broadcast crew.

“We’re still putting together our production plans; there’s lots of time still for that. But yes, we will have a unique voice,” Dionne said. “It’s going to be a different voice. It is going to be unique to DAZN. We will be producing the game, so it will be different than the TSN games, and our hope is that it’s additive for the fan base and that they get to hear new voices and have a slightly different look and feel.”

TSN has broadcast CFL games since 1987 and became the league’s exclusive television partner beginning in 2008. The network introduced the CFL on TSN panel for pre-game, halftime, and post-game coverage in 1997, and the format has remained largely unchanged in the three decades since.

The faces and voices of those employed by Bell Media in game-day roles have become a ubiquitous part of football viewership in Canada, often drawing as much fan interest as the players on the field. That will continue to be the case, with TSN retaining the rights to the majority of games under the new deal, though DAZN will now employ its own team of analysts, play-by-play announcers, commentators, and sideline reporters for 21 regular-season broadcasts and two playoff games annually.

Who gets hired for those roles and how the broadcasts are structured are open questions, with even the league’s commissioner waiting with bated breath.

“I’m looking forward to finding out myself. The one thing we know is there will be a slate of new voices,” Stewart Johnston said in a sitdown with 3DownNation. “However they are choosing to editorialize or portray those voices, that new talent is gonna be more voices talking about the CFL. How can that not be anything but good?”

Dionne, who was born in North Battleford, Sask., and grew up in Red Deer, Alta., is no stranger to the CFL game. She insists the league’s newest partner will carefully balance a desire to disrupt the market with the need to keep traditionalists happy.

“I grew up with a very hardcore CFL fandom in my family. I understand the legacy that is there, too,” she insisted. “Sometimes new means completely different, but we have a very good awareness that this is a legacy league and that the fans expect us to approach it knowing the CFL. We are going to have that in our hearts and our minds as we bring innovation and a new voice to who DAZN will be in this space.”

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Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Hammersmith, England, DAZN is the world’s largest sports-specific streaming service. The company’s digital platform is available in over 200 countries and territories, boasting close to 20 million subscribers for its eclectic mix of domestic and international content. They have been active in Canada since 2017, where they stream properties including NFL Game Pass, NCAA football, the UEFA Champions League, and the English Premier League.

“What they have proven is they can start in any given territory, they operate around the world, they can scale quickly, and they can drive innovative production storytelling,” Johnston said.

“They want to bring that experience that they’ve had with some of the biggest soccer leagues in the world, and many other leagues, and they want to bring that to Canada, but this is going to be a Canadian production. So it’s got the backbone of that international powerhouse production arm, but it is going to be Canadian-fronted, and I can’t wait to see them mount that.”

Dionne, a former Olympic bronze medallist for Team Canada in freestyle skiing, stated that the company is attracted to the growth potential of football internationally due to the inclusion of flag football in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. While the CFL makes sense as a domestic investment in Canada, DAZN also obtained the league’s international rights to complement their wider football offerings, filling a gap in the NFL and NCAA schedule.

Being placed alongside those products will benefit the league from an exposure standpoint, but CFL fans can also expect to witness a trickle-down of many of the bells and whistles currently available on those larger broadcast properties. This includes interactive fan zones to fuel community conversations and the ability to view up-to-the-minute highlights before joining a broadcast already in progress.

“Anybody who has been on the DAZN platform sees that we’re incredibly innovative,” Dionne said. “What I love about DAZN specifically is because we’re a global sports streaming service, we’re doing this at scale, and we’re learning across different markets to see what could work in Canada. We’re so heavily invested in football that innovation that’s happening elsewhere, we get to, as Canadians, experience that in the CFL and across our NFL properties as well.”

“The stat that really astounded me is I think they’ve got about 4,000 employees, and I think 2,000 of them are engineers. That’s how dedicated they are to the actual platform that delivers content,” CFL commissioner Stewart Johnston added. “With that platform and how advanced it is, it creates really, really cool storytelling techniques. We can’t wait to see them put into action.”

DAZN is already actively marketing their CFL partnership on the platform’s Canadian main page, though it is unclear how much fans will be charged to view games next year. The company currently offers six different subscription options ranging from $24.99 to $49.99 per month, depending on which sports you wish to view and which premium features you want access to.

A CFL or football-specific subscription could be a possibility for fans who aren’t interested in the streamer’s other offerings, though those details have yet to be ironed out.

“We’re still looking at how we’re going to package this content. We have a DAZN subscription that is a multi-sport subscription at the moment. We will continue to look at options,” Dionne said. “We take these rights in 2027, which is almost a full calendar year away. We’ll be listening in each of the marketplaces, looking at different options, but we haven’t come to terms on what that actually will look like. We still have some time.”

While CFL games have been streamed online on TSN+ at a cost for years, the league has never put games exclusively behind an online paywall domestically. That won’t be an issue for the younger generation of cord-cutting sports fans, but it may prove a challenge for the league’s older fan demographic. It will also limit casual viewership, with those games no longer accessible to absent-minded channel surfers.

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Johnston deflected questions about accessibility and cost, emphasizing instead that the consistent 7:00 p.m. ET timeslot on Saturday nights will help make DAZN a part of the weekly routine for sports fans in Canada.

“From my memory, this is the first time the CFL has been able to offer a consistent day and time for an entire season, even into the playoffs. Introducing a new partner and saying it’s Saturday Night Football at 7 o’clock Eastern, I think is a win for DAZN, and I think it’s a win for our fans to know exactly where to go to find those games,” Johnston stated.

“I cannot wait for our fans to see what DAZN can deliver. It is simply an outstanding platform, and they are distributed on every single device, so access is not going to be a problem. Consistency of schedule is not going to be a problem, and they’re going to bring some cool stuff to the table that’s going to be different than what we’ve seen before.”

DAZN will not get a say in which teams play on Saturdays, with the league indicating that they intend to proceed as normal with a balanced slate dictated by stadium availability. That doesn’t appear to be an issue, as the company isn’t concerned about using marquee matchups to boost its streaming numbers. In fact, success for the partnership will have little to do with matching TSN’s average viewership on traditional TV.

“An average minute audience is such a different metric than an actual digital consumer. We understand that the metrics on how viewership is measured has some flaws and some interesting formulas around it. It does factor in (to the decision to purchase the rights), but it is never the only factor that is considered,” Dionne said.

“We do a ton of short-form content across all of our platforms and so when we look at the success of a property, it isn’t limited to just how many people tuned in for a live sport. It is how many people are actually coming to the platform, engaging with our short-form highlights, checking out our story format, catch-up games, watching games in review. It’s so much broader than just a live number. I’m sure at some point we will get to projections as it relates to specific games, but we’re just not there yet. It’s way too early.”

Though Dionne declined to provide any further details regarding the company’s plans or projections for the CFL, she emphasized the seriousness with which DAZN plans to begin shaping its broadcast product. The streamer will be the first fresh voice to enter the league’s media landscape in nearly 20 years, and it will take the bulk of this season to determine the timbre and pitch of its storytelling.

“We have our team internationally coming out in the middle of the summer to experience the CFL in-person so that we can really get a look and feel for what’s currently being done from a production standpoint and what we will look to do from a production standpoint,” she said. “We’re really focused forward on everything that we need to accomplish before spring 2027, when we’re producing these games and in the marketplace with this as one of our core properties. That’s a lot of work. We’re really excited to take this on and figure out what our voice (is) and how DAZN will represent the CFL come season start in May of next year.”