DAZN Media+ has signed a commercial agreement with AudienceProject to put its Australian streaming services and its linear television inventory on a single audience measurement basis, with the resulting reports due to reach advertisers in 2027.

ELI5

DAZN Media+, the advertising arm that sells Foxtel, Kayo Sports and BINGE inventory in Australia, has hired an outside measurement company to count how many separate people its ads actually reach across all of those services plus regular television. Right now a brand running across three of those platforms cannot tell whether it hit three million people once or one million people three times. From 2027, advertisers buying that inventory will get one deduplicated number instead of several that cannot be added together.

What the agreement covers

The announcement, dated 3 September 2026 and issued from Sydney, sets out a partnership between DAZN Media+ and AudienceProject, the Copenhagen measurement company, to introduce unified cross-media audience measurement across what DAZN Media+ describes as its premium video ecosystem. According to the release, the partnership will give advertisers a consistent view of campaign reach and frequency across Kayo SPORTS, BINGE, Foxtel Go and linear TV.

A discrepancy sits inside the document itself. The body text names four measured environments, while a quotation from Nev Hasan, Chief Sales Officer at DAZN Media+, refers to Kayo SPORTS, BINGE, Foxtel Now and Foxtel Go delivering audiences alongside linear TV. Foxtel Now appears only in the quotation and not in the body copy. The release does not reconcile the two lists, and no separate inventory schedule accompanies it.

The commercial terms are not disclosed. Neither is the size of the Australian panel AudienceProject intends to recruit, the demographic breaks the reports will support, or whether the output will be audited locally.

How the measurement is constructed

The method described in the release is the hybrid model AudienceProject has deployed elsewhere. Census-level campaign delivery data from DAZN Media+ platforms is combined with AudienceProject's independent audience panel. According to the company, that combination allows advertisers to understand campaign demographics, co-viewing, reach and frequency, and overlap across platforms using a single and consistent measurement methodology.

Overlap is the operative word. When a campaign runs on a subscription sports app, an entertainment streaming service and a linear channel, each environment reports its own audience, and those figures cannot simply be summed without counting the same viewer several times. Deduplication resolves the repeated exposures back to one person. Everything downstream, including effective cost per thousand and any judgement about whether a channel earned its budget, depends on that resolution being done consistently rather than three different ways.

The second capability named in the release is incremental reach. According to the announcement, the solution will let advertisers measure the additional audiences reached through Kayo SPORTS and BINGE beyond linear TV. That figure answers a narrower and more commercially awkward question than total reach: not how many people a streaming buy touched, but how many of them the linear buy had not already touched. A streaming platform that mostly reaches viewers already covered by the broadcast schedule is selling duplication. One that reaches new households is selling growth. Without the deduplicated view, the two look identical on a plan.

Panel-based independence is the sales argument. AudienceProject calculates reach and audience profiles from its own consented and weighted panel rather than from platform-reported metrics, an approach detailed in the white paper the company published in April 2026, which also described the methodology as having been audited by outside parties including PwC and Mediasense. That paper listed Australia among future markets, alongside Brazil, Belgium, India, South Korea, Japan, Turkey, Portugal, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria and the United States. Four months later, Australia is no longer hypothetical.

The reach figures DAZN cites

Hasan attached numbers to the rationale. "Our cross-platform testing has shown the role streaming can play in extending campaign reach, with previous analysis identifying that streaming added 36% reach to AFL and 27% to NRL campaigns," he said. "Now, with AudienceProject, we can take that principle from a test environment into a consistent cross-media solution across our entire premium video ecosystem."

Those percentages are vendor-supplied. They come from DAZN Media+'s own cross-platform testing, the release gives no sample size, no measurement window and no methodology, and the whole point of the AudienceProject agreement is that such figures have not previously been produced on an independent basis. Hasan effectively concedes as much in the following paragraph.

"From 2027, for the first time, we'll be able to independently demonstrate the true scale and unique reach of our combined assets through a globally recognised measurement platform," he said. "Advertisers will have a clearer view of the audiences Kayo SPORTS, BINGE, Foxtel Now and Foxtel Go deliver alongside linear TV, including the incremental value each platform contributes. That shifts the focus from where an audience is watching to the real value each platform contributes, enabling smarter planning, more effective investment and better outcomes across total TV."

Thomas Gregers Honoré, AudienceProject's chief executive, framed the Australian entry in market-development terms. "AudienceProject has been working with leading media owners and advertisers globally to address the growing need for independent cross-media measurement that reflects today's increasingly complex media environment," he said. "Bringing that experience to Australia is an important next step for the market, and our work with DAZN Media+ will help accelerate the adoption of more robust, comparable measurement as streaming continues to grow."

A collective deal and a commercial one

The DAZN Media+ agreement is the second AudienceProject arrangement in Australia inside two weeks, and the two are structurally different.

On 24 August 2026, the Video Futures Collective and AudienceProject announced a collaboration to build what the Collective described as Australia's first independent cross-media audience measurement solution. The Collective is the industry association that grew out of a think tank established by Foxtel Media in early 2024 and formalised in March 2026, with founding members including Amazon Prime, Disney Advertising, Foxtel Media, Netflix, Samsung Ads, SBS, Vevo and YouTube.

The September 3 release positions the DAZN Media+ deal as following that collaboration. As a founding member of the Collective, DAZN Media+ has entered its own commercial agreement with AudienceProject to deliver consistent, independently measured reporting for its advertising partners. The distinction matters for how buyers read it. The Collective arrangement is a market-level initiative, with the ambition of comparable numbers across competing platforms. The DAZN Media+ contract is a single seller buying measurement for its own inventory, on its own timetable, with its own start date.

That sequencing is familiar from AudienceProject's European expansion, where market entry and individual media-owner contracts have run on parallel tracks. What is not yet clear is whether the Collective's members will land on the same panel, the same definitions and the same reporting cadence, or whether Australia acquires a second measurement source that sits beside rather than inside its existing television currency.

The Australian gap the deal targets

Australian video spending has grown considerably faster than the measurement infrastructure underneath it. The country's digital advertising market reached a record $4.9 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up 15.3% year on year, with video accounting for 73.2% of total display expenditure, up from 71.4% a year earlier. Broadcaster video on demand grew 10.1% in the same quarter.

Buyers have said plainly that the numbers do not line up. IAB Australia survey work published in May 2026 documented a measurement gap across a $5.4 billion video market, including sharp variation in whether platforms supply the data signals needed for outcomes measurement. Ad-supported subscription streaming services trailed the field, with only 63% of respondents consistently or sometimes obtaining adequate signals and 19% reporting that signals from that category were rarely available. The trade body had already published a video measurement framework in December 2025 covering media delivery, brand impact and sales outcomes, and returned to the technical layer on 6 August 2026 with an explainer on server-guided ad insertion that set out how delivery architecture affects measurement accuracy in BVOD, CTV apps and live channels.

Consumption data points the same direction. Ipsos iris research published in May 2026 put Australian streaming consumption at roughly 21 hours a week, and IAB Australia reporting from April 2026 found 13.5 million Australians aged 14 and over visiting an online sports website or app in an average month over the year to February 2026, with BVOD sports audiences peaking during the September finals window and the January Australian Open. Sports inventory concentrates audiences into short, expensive windows. Those are precisely the windows where duplicated reach is most costly to a buyer and hardest to detect.

DAZN's Australian position

DAZN acquired Foxtel in a transaction that completed in April 2025, a deal valued at AU$3.4 billion that gave the London-based streamer 4.7 million subscribers, the AFL and NRL rights, Fox Sports and the advertising arm then known as Foxtel Media. Kayo Sports, BINGE and Foxtel retained their consumer brands. The sales operation has since been rebranded as DAZN Media+.

The advertising business has been visible on the technology side through the transition. Foxtel Media appeared among the early participants when PubMatic opened its agentic advertising operating system on 5 January 2026, with John Matthews, its Executive Director of Advanced Advertising, citing potential for agent-led workflows across live sports and streaming. Measurement is the other half of that posture. Automated buying systems allocate against reported audience figures, and figures that cannot be deduplicated across a seller's own portfolio limit what any optimisation layer can do with them.

What 2027 means

The release states that AudienceProject's measurement solution will be available to DAZN Media+ clients from 2027, giving advertisers an independent and comparable basis for evaluating campaign performance across DAZN Media+ platforms. No month is specified. No pilot phase is described. Campaigns booked through the 2026 spring carnival, the summer cricket season and the January tennis window will be planned and reported on the existing basis.

AudienceProject has spent 2026 widening both its market footprint and its product surface. It entered Poland on 2 March, built a Trade Desk integration across eight European markets announced on 25 February, signed Omnicom Media Italy on 27 May, added Pinterest measurement for the United Kingdom and Germany in June, opened its Elevate environment to broadcasters and publishers on 22 June, and shipped Elevate 3.0 with an AI assistant across ten markets on 27 August. Australia is the first market outside Europe and the Americas to be named in that sequence.

For media buyers, the practical question is narrower than the announcement language suggests. A deduplicated reach figure across a single seller's portfolio resolves double counting inside that portfolio. It does not reconcile DAZN Media+ delivery against YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video or the commercial broadcasters unless those sellers land on comparable measurement, which is what the Video Futures Collective arrangement is meant to address and what the September 3 release does not claim to deliver. Whether the two strands converge, and on what timetable, will determine how much of the fragmentation actually closes.

Timeline

Summary

Who: DAZN Media+, the Australian advertising sales business built on Foxtel, Kayo Sports and BINGE, and AudienceProject, the Copenhagen-based independent cross-media measurement company. Nev Hasan, Chief Sales Officer at DAZN Media+, and Thomas Gregers Honoré, chief executive of AudienceProject, provided statements. The Video Futures Collective, of which DAZN Media+ is a founding member, agreed a separate collaboration with AudienceProject in August 2026.

What: A commercial agreement to deliver unified cross-media audience measurement across DAZN Media+ inventory. Census-level campaign delivery data from the company's platforms will be combined with AudienceProject's independent panel to produce demographics, co-viewing, reach and frequency, platform overlap and incremental reach on a single methodology. The release names Kayo SPORTS, BINGE, Foxtel Go and linear TV in its body text, while a quotation additionally names Foxtel Now.

When: The announcement is dated 3 September 2026. The measurement solution becomes available to DAZN Media+ clients from 2027, with no month specified. The Video Futures Collective collaboration was announced on 24 August 2026.

Where: Australia, across streaming and linear television inventory sold by DAZN Media+. The announcement was issued from Sydney.

Why: Australian video advertising has grown faster than the measurement able to describe it, with video now 73.2% of display spending and buyers reporting inconsistent data signals across platform types. Campaign delivery across a sports app, an entertainment streaming service and a linear channel currently produces figures that cannot be added together without double counting, leaving incremental reach unmeasured and channel-level budget decisions resting on incomparable numbers.