DAZN announced that more than a million people watched the middleweight title unification between Canelo Alvarez and Daniel Jacobs on May 4.
The streaming service sent out a press release stating that more than 1.2 million people worldwide watched live on DAZN across the company’s eight current markets. In addition to the United States, home to the majority of the viewership, the fight was also available to DAZN subscribers in Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Switzerland.
Although the company did not announce how many of those 1.2 million views came from inside the United States, a couple of reports from Mike Coppinger, Dan Rafael and Lance Pugmire state that at least 600,000 people in the United States watched the fight. That number beats the average viewership of the Top Rank on ESPN card that was taking place at the same time on television, which was at around 480,000.
Alvarez defeated Jacobs by unanimous decision to unify the WBA “Super,” WBC and IBF middleweight titles in the main event of the card taking place at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The fight was Alvarez’s second in his 11-fight deal with the streaming service with the first one taking place last December when he knocked out Rocky Fielding to become the new WBA “Regular” super middleweight champion. DAZN did not release viewership numbers for that fight, but at the time, the app jumped to the top slot across iOS and Android as the No. 1 free app for the first time in the United States, per a press release.
The streaming platform will look to ride the momentum with multiple big events in the coming weeks. As far as boxing is concerned, DAZN will have a World Boxing Super Series card on May 18 from Scotland, Anthony Joshua’s U.S. debut on June 1 and Gennadiy Golovkin’s DAZN debut on June 8. DAZN will also stream Bellator 221 on May 11 and Bellator 222 on June 14.
