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It’s no secret that consumers, especially younger ones, increasingly favour cheaper, contract-free viewing over the Internet.

In 2016, 23 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 34 said they watched TV exclusively online, up from 16 per cent two years prior, according to Media Technology Monitor. About 64 per cent of people in this age group subscribe to Netflix.

Overall, researchers estimate Canada is home to six million Netflix subscribers, while the number of TV subscribers has dipped an average of one per cent per year for the past five years.

For all of DAZN’s problems during its first NFL season — Rushton said he’d give its performance a C+ — the company’s outlook for Canada is positive. The key will be minimizing technical glitches and adding more content, he said, pointing to recent deals for European soccer and boxing matches.

“We obviously have to continue to get better. We have to convince the fans we’re doing our best to do that,” he said, though he still acknowledged streaming won’t be “100-per-cent perfect 100 per cent of the time.”

No one cannot take these guys seriously at the end of the day Convergence Research founder Brahm Eiley

Rushton splits subscribers into two camps: those who want online streaming and like the monthly $20 contract-free price, and serious football fans who needed DAZN to access Sunday Ticket. He would not reveal how many subscribers DAZN has in Canada, but Convergence Research Group Ltd. estimates the number is in the low six figures.

DAZN, which also operates in Japan, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, started licensing Sunday Ticket to TV providers about halfway through the season after a rocky start where the NFL apologized to fans for “inadequate service.” Ruston said there was no pressure from the NFL to license the content back to broadcasters — “They sold us the rights, they didn’t have to do so” — and that it was his decision.

Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

“If you truly are a fan-first service, then why wouldn’t you look to work with broadcast distribution units in a way that’s sensible,” he said, adding DAZN continues to have a constructive, solid relationship with the league. “Ultimately, the NFL, and rightly so, has very high standards of all its broadcast partners.”

NFL spokeswoman Darlene Capiro said in an email the NFL is “working with DAZN and Canadian BDUs (broadcast distribution units) to ensure that there will be a TV offering for Sunday Ticket and details will be forthcoming though we are in the midst of discussions.”

Getting games in front of as many viewers as possible is critical for the NFL. Its TV ratings dropped about 10 per cent during the regular season last year, the second year of declines.

Some blamed structural changes in the TV market, others blamed attention shifting to news in the Donald Trump era. Regardless, the league has signed live streaming deals with Facebook, Amazon and Twitter to “follow our fans,” NFL’s digital media president Mary Ann Turcke said in Toronto in February.

“We’ve got to go where they are and reverse engineer the monetization model underneath it,” she said.

For some fans being ushered into online streaming, they’d rather be in the TV ecosystem. Vancouver fan Sean Meade even started a Twitter account named @DAZNSucks to try to convince DAZN to put Sunday Ticket back on cable.