NEW YORK – A fan in Queens who has watched every Yankees home game through the YES Network feed on the Gotham Sports App does not yet know what that will cost next season. The missing number is the DAZN subscription price for MSG and YES content, and it was absent from the announcement that will reshape how every New York sports household watches the Knicks, the Yankees, and five other franchises beginning this fall.
DAZN, a British streaming platform that built its American audience around boxing and international soccer, announced Wednesday it has struck an exclusive deal to become the direct-to-consumer streaming home of the YES Network and MSG Networks. Seven franchises move with it: the Yankees, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Devils, Islanders, and Sabres. The Gotham Sports App, the joint venture YES and MSG launched barely two years ago, will shut down. The exact timing of the migration has not been set.
The deal covers the entire commercial center of the country’s most lucrative sports market, and it arrives at a specific moment. The Knicks won their first NBA championship since 1973 in June, Jalen Brunson’s 45-point championship-clinching performance completing a run that turned the franchise into one of the league’s most valuable streaming properties. The Yankees are in the middle of a playoff chase. DAZN has acquired the streaming rights to both at a moment when both are unusually worth acquiring.
What cable subscribers receive is relatively straightforward. If MSG Networks or the YES Network is already part of a pay-TV package, through any provider that carries them, DAZN access will be included at no additional charge. That mirrors the arrangement that governed the Gotham Sports App, according to Yahoo Sports, where cable subscribers received the streaming feed without a separate subscription. That class of subscriber faces no new purchase decision before October.
The cord-cutter does. Anyone currently paying the Gotham Sports App’s $34.99-a-month or $299.99-a-year rate for standalone access to MSG and YES content will migrate to DAZN on terms the company has not disclosed. DAZN chief executive Shay Segev called the partnership a defining moment for the platform’s US expansion in a statement accompanying the announcement. He did not say what the service will cost.
That omission is not standard for a streaming announcement. Platform pricing is usually the second paragraph of a deal release. Its absence here leaves the most commercially consequential question unanswered for the portion of the New York sports market that has already cut cable or lost access to MSG and YES through carrier disputes. Some of those fans have been watching games through workarounds or not at all. They do not yet know whether DAZN offers them a cheaper path back in than the $34.99 they were paying. The Knicks’ championship defense begins in October, and DAZN has not said when the price will be announced.
The Gotham Sports App, the vehicle being discontinued, was itself a two-year attempt to solve a version of the same problem. When YES and MSG formed their joint streaming venture in late 2024, the stated goal was consolidating what had been two separate apps into one manageable subscription. The consolidation worked at the product level. At the subscriber-base level it apparently did not, and the platform never disclosed user numbers. Its replacement by a global platform with operations in more than 200 markets suggests the joint venture’s economics did not justify continuing it beyond two NBA and NHL seasons.
The New York announcement is one piece of a larger DAZN expansion in the United States. Sports Business Journal reported Wednesday that the company is in advanced talks to acquire full exclusive local broadcast streaming rights for five more NBA teams: the Cleveland Cavaliers, Indiana Pacers, Memphis Grizzlies, Minnesota Timberwolves, and San Antonio Spurs. Negotiations are also underway for partial arrangements with the Charlotte Hornets and Orlando Magic. If those deals close before October, DAZN would control local streaming rights for more than a third of the league in a single offseason. The structural implications for the regional sports network model that delivered local games to American households for three decades are already in motion.
YES Network president and CEO Jon Litner described the deal as aligned with the network’s direct-to-consumer strategy for Yankees and Nets fans. Kevin Marotta, MSG Networks senior vice president, cited the Knicks’ championship season as context for wanting a premier global platform as a distribution partner. DAZN streams more than 140,000 live events annually across its global footprint, with rights to the Bundesliga, the Premier League, and Formula 1 among others. Expanding into regional NBA, MLB, and NHL rights is a different commercial challenge, built around habitual local viewing rather than the international sports fan DAZN has spent a decade cultivating.
The wider streaming landscape is being redrawn at the same time. Netflix is exploring always-on linear channels as engagement slips between original series seasons, a sign of how thoroughly the structure of American television is being reconstructed. DAZN’s move into New York local sports is a different corner of the same shift: regional sports networks are not ending because one company decided it, but because the economics that held the model together for 30 years no longer do.
For the New York sports fan, the practical question is still open. The cable subscriber who receives MSG and YES in their package has nothing to act on yet. The cord-cutter paying $34.99 a month on the Gotham Sports App has a migration coming and no price to compare it against. DAZN has not said when that number will be announced. The Yankees’ postseason push is not waiting for a platform to set its rates.
