Broadcast-streaming. Amazon has acquired rights to show 20 English Premier League (EPL) soccer matches in the UK for three years from 2019. The matches will be available “free” to Amazon Prime’s UK members (who pay £79 per year membership fee). EPL coverage in the UK is still dominated both by BT Sport and Sky TV (the cable/satellite network which originally soared on the back of its ground-breaking live coverage). But the departure of BT’s CEO Gavin Patterson may signal a pulling back from the telco’s so-expensive foray into live soccer. Arguably, it succeeded only in driving up the prices both for it and Sky. On the other hand, the Amazon deal signals a new era in which advertising-free streaming services increasingly compete with traditional broadcasters to screen live sport. It is assumed that this trend will accelerate during the next few years with the likely sale of the Fox-controlled Sky either to Disney or Comcast, both of which have medium-term ambitions to challenge Netflix as global streaming networks. Earlier this year, Amazon outbid Sky to win exclusive UK rights for men’s tennis world tour matches in a reported $40m deal. And, in the US, it is paying the NFL $130m to screen American football matches on Thursday nights for the next two seasons. The scale of these deals and their traditional significance to broadcast audiences seem certain to hasten the tipping point for online viewing. We should expect Netflix too to start spending some of their huge content budgets on live sports. It’s premature to call the end of live sport on network television, but these streaming contracts will further drag down broadcast audiences – and advertising revenue.
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Amazon muscles into English Premier League
