How EverPass’s Sale to DAZN Gives the NFL a New Stake in Sports Media While Leaving Commercial Customers Facing Costly Streaming Decisions
By the time DAZN agreed to buy EverPass, some of the businesses paying to show NFL games had a different transaction on their minds. They had prepared to replace satellite television with streaming, only to learn that DirecTV was coming back. Inside those venues, the question was what their investment had bought them. Upstairs in the ownership picture, the NFL was preparing to turn its investment into a stake in another distributor of its games.
DAZN’s Aug. 26 agreement would make 32 Equity, the NFL’s investment arm, a minority shareholder alongside EverPass backers RedBird Capital Partners and TKO Group Holdings.
The league acquired 10% of ESPN in January. Now its commercial Sunday Ticket business offered another route into media ownership. The distinction is important, though. DAZN announced an agreement to acquire EverPass, with the ownership changes tied to completion, rather than a confirmed closing.
EverPass’s chief executive Alex Kaplan would remain in charge and take on an expanded role at DAZN. His company would become DAZN for Business. But before following the money there, it helps to understand why Kaplan's business became valuable enough to buy, and why some customers felt they had helped pay for its transformation without much say in the process.
Why the NFL created EverPass
The story starts with the breakup of a familiar arrangement. YouTube took over residential Sunday Ticket in 2023, but its deal did not cover bars, restaurants, and hotels. Those businesses needed separate commercial rights. On March 28 that year, the NFL and Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird announced EverPass to serve them. RedBird funded the venture, and the league invested through 32 Equity. Sunday Ticket supplied the starting product and a reason for businesses to sign up.
Kaplan knew that product from the inside. During a decade at DirecTV and AT&T, he managed Sunday Ticket, negotiated its 2014 renewal, and helped extend it online through SundayTicket.TV. He understood the satellite business he would later try to move customers beyond. And as sports scattered across streaming services, the problem facing a bar owner became harder than finding the right channel.
“You can't have five different subscription apps on 15 screens," RedBird managing director Kevin LaForce told JohnWallStreet in September 2024. “It doesn't scale, notwithstanding the technical challenges.”
EverPass could build a business around solving that problem, but holding rights alone would not do it. In July 2024, it bought UPshow, giving Kaplan streaming technology designed for commercial venues and a way to deliver programming through its own platform.
The parent of UFC and WWE, TKO, invested alongside that expansion. Its filings show an initial $15 million payment for approximately 5% of EverPass, another $2 million contribution in September, and $13 million for an additional stake in 2025.
As the money came in, Kaplan added programming. As of February 2026, an Apple agreement brought Formula 1, MLS and Friday Night Baseball into EverPass Core at no additional charge for that package’s customers.
The Switch became an expensive reversal
Building a streaming service was one challenge. And persuading businesses to rebuild around it was another, particularly when their satellite systems still worked. In March, EverPass told customers that Sunday Ticket’s commercial future would run through its streaming service.
And by May, its message to one operator remained firm.
“To clarify, there are no active discussions between EverPass and DirecTV regarding NFL Sunday Ticket," the company wrote.
Jim Hallers put a price on the transition when he appeared before a House Judiciary subcommittee on June 10. The founder and the managing partner of Tailgators Pub & Grill and Citizens Grill in the Houston area was testifying at a hearing examining the Sports Broadcasting Act. His restaurants depended on serving fans of different teams, and that meant showing several games at once while keeping the rest of the business running.
"One commercial video switch with enough inputs and outputs can cost in excess of $15,000,” Hallers wrote in his testimony. "A full upgrade including equipment, wiring and the labor will cost $30,000 to $40,000 per restaurant.”
Those were his estimates for the work his operations faced, not a national average. If you run a bar with dozens of screens, downloading an app is only the beginning. Someone still has to connect everything and keep it working.
Hallers explained that game streams will share internet capacity with payment processing and other restaurant systems. He also needed other television services for local games and programming outside Sunday Ticket.
So buying into EverPass did not clear every other bill off his desk. Then, on July 31, EverPass and DirecTV announced a new multiyear agreement; this allowed commercial customers to receive Sunday Ticket through satellite or streaming. The supposedly unavoidable conversion suddenly became a choice.
“This agreement is about creating greater availability for bars, restaurants and other commercial businesses so they can offer NFL Sunday Ticket, and other live sports content, with flexibility in how they receive the service," Kaplan said in the announcement.
DirecTV for Business became EverPass’s preferred national distributor. Kaplan had brought the satellite operator back into the arrangement, but businesses that had acted on the earlier message could not simply rewind their purchases.
Dan Weissman, IT director at Casino M8trix in San Jose, California, described that frustration in an email reported by Awful Announcing on Aug. 21.
"We absorbed the cost, the disruption, and the operational risk, only to learn that the mandate was never really a mandate,” he wrote. “It was a bluff to try to reap all the licensing fees for yourself, and our money was the collateral."
(The bluff allegation was Weissman's interpretation, not an established account of the negotiations).
DAZN gets a business it does not have to build
Whatever happened inside those talks, the July agreement gave EverPass two ways to reach customers. Less than four weeks later, DAZN announced its acquisition agreement. The appeal went beyond Sunday Ticket.
EverPass brought commercial relationships with American venues and technology for managing their screens. (DAZN could build on that operation rather than persuade each business to start from scratch with an unfamiliar supplier).
Its content relationships also stretched beyond football through Peacock, Netflix, Paramount and Apple. Those agreements gave venues reasons to keep using the service outside NFL Sundays. For DAZN, the opportunity was to sell more programming through established commercial relationships while developing EverPass's technology for its international business.
Keeping Kaplan in charge would preserve continuity with the executive who had built the operation, including the relationships tested during the DirecTV dispute.
The NFL Keeps an Interest After the Sale
For the league, the ESPN comparison shows why the ownership terms deserve attention. Disney's filing says ESPN acquired NFL Network, NFL Fantasy, and NFL RedZone’s pay television distribution rights on Jan. 31 in exchange for a 10% noncontrolling interest. Disney estimated the transaction’s fair value at approximately $3 billion. The NFL received an economic interest in ESPN without gaining control of the company.
The DAZN arrangement takes a different route. The NFL invested in EverPass through 32 Equity, which would become a minority DAZN shareholder under the acquisition agreement.
Public terms do not establish the stake’s size or the full payment structure, so calling it a simple stock swap goes too far. What is clear is that the league’s investment arm would remain in the ownership picture after EverPass changes hands.
The potential benefit reaches beyond collecting fees for football rights. A stake can rise in value if the distributor grows, although it can also lose value.
However, it does not promise the NFL a payment from every DAZN subscription. Still, the arrangement will give the league exposure to a media company's fortunes while it continues licensing games across competing television and streaming services.
In other words, the NFL would retain an interest in what happens after it sells access to its games. But investors and restaurant operators judge that business from different positions. A venue needs enough customers buying food and drinks to justify its sports bill. A new owner does not automatically change that calculation, or repay money committed during a disputed transition. DAZN’s opportunity therefore comes with a practical test for Kaplan, whose customers have good reason to want clear answers before another major equipment purchase.