What is DAZN? How do you pronounce it? Why do New York sports fans want it?
DAZN is the new home for streaming MSG Networks and YES Network. Credit: Getty Images/Daniela Porcelli
When it was first announced in July that the Gotham Sports App was going to be replaced in October by something called DAZN as the streaming home for the Knicks, Islanders, Rangers, Yankees, Nets and Devils, many viewers were happy.
The Gotham Sports App, a co-owned venture of the MSG and YES Networks, was not popular. It was plagued by technical problems and, for the most part, did not live up to its ambitious goals after it was launched in October 2024.
Enter DAZN.
But what is DAZN?
And how do you pronounce it? (Hint: It’s not “DA-ZIN”. It’s not “D-A-Z-N”.)
DAZN is a British company that first launched in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Japan in 2016 and entered the U.S. market in 2018. Until recently, it had best been known in the U.S. for showing boxing and other combat sports.
But DAZN has emerged in the U.S. in a big way in 2026. It is now the streaming home for 19 teams across the NBA, WNBA, NHL and MLB. It wants to be the “global home of sports,” since its international portfolio already includes the Super Bowl, World Cup and March Madness.
“In many markets in Europe and in parts of Asia we are the number one sports broadcaster,” DAZN senior vice president of strategy and business development Zander Berlinski told Newsday in a telephone interview. “Not to say that tomorrow we're going to be the number one sports broadcaster in the U.S., but I think our goal is to sort of build up that portfolio over time starting with the 19 teams we have now and expand from there.”
New York sports fans probably don’t care about DAZN’s plans for global domination. They just want the darn thing to work when they sit down to watch a game.
As with the defunct Gotham Sports App, DAZN streams every game that appears on MSG and YES Networks for those teams, plus other programming. It does not stream games that are not on MSG or YES. The app is free if you already have YES and/or MSG through a participating provider. Otherwise, DAZN's plans range from $19.99 a month for YES only to $299.99 a year for the MSG + YES bundle.
The transition from the Gotham Sports App was supposed to be seamless, with customers switching over to DAZN using their Gotham credentials. There have been some hiccups, according to viewers.
Rich Hume, a cord-cutter from Bay Shore who is an annual plan subscriber to DAZN, had trouble at first making the switch. But a day after reaching out by email to Gotham Sports App customer service, he was able to navigate the transition steps and is using the app to watch Knicks games on multiple devices.
“No problems at all,” he said. “Don’t have the issues that you had with Gotham where it would cut out or freeze and you’d have to restart it. And it’s $10 less than I paid last year.”
DAZN used its own streaming technology instead of picking up the Gotham Sports App’s version, Berlinski said.
“From a migration perspective, it's something we've done before,” he said. “At the core of it, the biggest concern for fans is, ‘There's a Knicks game tonight. How do I watch it? Is it going to be smooth and easy to sign up, and on the device I want it to be on, and be completely the way I want it?’ That's not something we take for granted and is something that our tech team on a day-to-day basis focuses on and monitors. We think we've built some of, if not the best, technology from that perspective in the world.”
Rudy Rosenberg of Carle Place, who watched the Islanders and Yankees on the Gotham Sports App, said he has yet to make the switch after only receiving an email about it on Friday. His first attempt did not go well.
“I was getting very frustrated because first I was trying to find out when does my membership expire,” he said. “And I couldn’t find that anywhere. And then I kept going around in circles. It’s very frustrating. I just don’t understand what’s going on. It’s a simple question.”
Rosenberg said he plans to reach out to customer service to get the issue resolved so he can start using the app.
“I just want it to work and I want it to be friendly and accessible,” he said.
Even though he was unable to get the answers he was seeking on Friday, Rosenberg did learn one thing: How to pronounce “DAZN”.
It’s "Da Zone”.
“It figured it was DA-ZIN,” he said. “Then I learned it was ‘Da Zone.’ That makes more sense.”
Hume, the Bay Shore customer, said: “ ‘Da Zone? Is that how you pronounce it? Sounds like a French channel.”
The name is indeed pronounced “Da Zone,” as in "get in the zone."
As a recent presentation to introduce DAZN to the New York market, a moderator traced the journey of “a fledging streaming service that no one could really pronounce to what is a real industry leader.”
Said Berlinski: “We tend to see a lot of initially potential mispronunciations or confusion. Is it ‘DA-ZIN’? Is it 'DAY-ZIN'? But I think what I'd say is if you go anywhere in Western Europe or in parts of Asia where we're very big, everyone knows how to pronounce it . . . I'm sure when ESPN first started, some people called it ‘S-Pin’.”
ESPN at its launch in 1979 was called “Entertainment and Sports Programming Network,” a name that was dropped six years later in favor of the acronym “ESPN” that is known the world over.
DAZN is not an acronym. It is simply a stylized way of saying “the zone.”
But is it a good name?
Zachary Estes, professor of marketing at Bayes Business School at the City University of London, is not completely in the zone on that.
“It’s no wonder that consumers don’t know that DAZN is supposed to be pronounced ‘Da Zone’,” he wrote in an email. “Its intended pronunciation violates basic principles of language. Our brains are finely tuned for recognizing words, and a basic principle is that we naturally pronounce consonant-vowel-consonant strings as words. So we naturally and automatically read DAZ as the word ‘dazz.’ And because there’s an ‘N’ on the end of it, people naturally read it as something like ‘dazzin’. And because ‘dazzin’ doesn’t make any sense, many people will then revert back to just calling it ‘D-A-Z-N’. So the linguistic problem is the vowel 'A'. If they wanted to be called ‘Da Zone,’ then they should have used DZON instead.
“At the end of the day though, because DAZN has a strong and unique offer, viewers will adopt the service if it shows the sports they’re interested in. The ambiguous pronunciation of DAZN is an obstacle to consumers learning what the brand offers — the allusion to sports is not obvious. But once they know what the brand does, sports fans will adopt the service despite its ambiguous name.”
Anthony Rieber covers sports media and business and professional sports (you know, games and trades and things). He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since Jan. 1, 2026.
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