SquashTV and Dailymotion: Why Streaming Growth Is Really About Owning the Fan Relationship

SquashTV’s streaming growth story with Dailymotion starts with a familiar problem: fans may find a sport through a clip, then have to go somewhere else to watch the match that matters. SportsPro reports that SquashTV, the Professional Squash Association’s official streaming service, generated more than 2.7 million video views and over 800,000 streamed hours across the season. Its target is 16% year-on-year growth in subscribers and viewers.

Those figures matter, but the sharper point is not reach. It is whether a rights holder can turn attention into a relationship that survives the next scroll, the next event and the next season.

A view is not yet a business relationship

Emerging sports do not necessarily lack content, committed fans or commercial potential. Their problem is fragmentation. Clips and social posts can create discovery, while live viewing happens elsewhere; without a clear destination, each moment of attention can remain separate from the next.

SquashTV’s model connects live tournaments, replays and archive programming under one branded destination. That gives the PSA more than an event broadcast: it creates a place fans can return to. A replay catalogue can keep working after the final point, supporting subscriptions, advertising and sponsorship over time.

This is the first lesson for creators, rights holders and partners. Audience size is a weak measure if the audience cannot be invited back into a continuing relationship. A subscriber is not simply a better view count; they are evidence that a viewer has chosen a destination.

The destination still has an operating layer

Dailymotion’s Edge offering provides the live and on-demand video technology behind the SquashTV experience, including a player that can be tailored to a rights holder’s brand and embedded in its own websites and applications. That is a meaningful step beyond sending audiences to a generic video destination.

But it also exposes the next question. A branded surface can make the fan relationship feel closer to the rights holder while the technology that delivers and shapes that experience remains operated by an intermediary. More capability inside a service can be valuable, yet it can also pull more of a rights holder’s audience operation into systems it does not operate.

The larger shift is that streaming is becoming an operating layer for identity, programming and fan access, not merely a distribution channel. Once that layer carries the ongoing audience relationship, control over its foundations matters as much as control over the match footage.

Who operates the relationship infrastructure?

SquashTV shows the value of gathering dispersed attention into one place. It also shows the dependency that remains: the path between a fan, the programming and the branded experience is still organized through centralized streaming infrastructure. The rights holder can own the destination’s brand while the service provider operates the layer that makes the destination function.

That should not be the only available model for creator businesses. Without creator-operated infrastructure, identity, publishing, direct commerce and the fan relationship can remain separated across services whose rules and boundaries are set elsewhere. Certifyd’s live public ecosystem includes surfaces for creator publishing, ownership, direct commerce, profiles and network participation. Those are current, publicly demonstrated parts of its network.

Certifyd is also positioned in beta as creator-owned infrastructure that can support multiple creator-business products from a shared foundation. The architecture it is building toward moves supported creator functions away from an intermediary-owned operating environment and toward infrastructure creators can operate as part of the network. For a rights holder trying to turn discovery into return visits, that creates a more durable possibility: the relationship around the work need not be defined entirely by the streaming service that carries it.

Streaming can create a destination. The harder question is whether creators and rights holders can operate more of the infrastructure that connects their work to the people who return.

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Originally published on Certifyd.