Title : Amazon set to purchase first Premier League television rights package
link : Amazon set to purchase first Premier League television rights package
Amazon set to purchase first Premier League television rights package
Premier League TV revolution as Amazon buys package of matches to launch threat against Sky Sports and BT Sport – meaning fans will have to pay a minimum of £860 a year to see all games
- Amazon has bought their first Premier League television rights package
- The online giant has purchased one of the remaining packages for 2019 to 2022
- This will allow Amazon to show 20 domestic matches across two match days
- The other set of remaining fixtures has been bought by BT Sport for £90million
- A membership for Amazon Prime will set supporters back £5.99 per month
- Access to Sky Sports, BT Sport and Amazon Prime will cost over £860 a year
The richest football league in the world now has the current most profitable business in company history as one of its TV partners.
US tech giants Amazon have dipped their toes into the Premier League waters by agreeing a three-year deal to stream 20 Premier League matches a season.
This is a considerable coup for the top flight and its departing executive chairman Richard Scudamore.
Amazon has purchased its first Premier League television rights package for 2019 to 2022
Amazon have long been in the running to snap up one of the remaining two packages on offer
Amazon are understood to have only paid a cut-price £30million a year for broadcasting simultaneously a full round of midweek fixtures in early December followed by a full festive programme — one of two unwanted packages that went unsold at the Premier League rights auction last February when bids failed to reach the reserve price.
Disappointingly, for the first time the Premier League failed to reveal how much Amazon had paid when all their previous domestic deals had been transparent. It was claimed that there was no regulatory obligation to announce the Amazon numbers officially.
With BT Sport paying £90m for the other package, total domestic revenues are estimated at £4.65bn. That figure is around £450m less than the current £5.1bn domestic rights deal but the shortfall will easily be covered by the increase in overseas revenues.
And having Amazon on board means the Premier League have every opportunity over the next three years of attracting the Seattle-based company to invest a lot more when the TV rights are sold again in another competitive market.
Richard Scudamore described Amazon as 'an exciting new partner for the Premier League'
Amazon will also stream a weekly highlights show and have begun preliminary talks about additional football programming to support their new content which starts in the 2019-2020 season. The football will be shown on Amazon Prime Video in the UK at no extra cost to Prime members.
Jay Marine, vice-president of Prime Video in Europe, said: ‘We are always looking to add more value to Prime and we are delighted to now offer live Premier League matches. Over those two December fixture rounds, Prime members will be able to watch every team.’
Scudamore said: ‘Amazon is an exciting new partner for the Premier League and we are very pleased they have chosen to invest in these rights. Prime Video will be an excellent service on which fans can consume live Premier League football including a full round of fixtures for the first time.’
It was widely predicted that the two packages left on the shelf for four months would go to Sky and BT for next to nothing, with Scudamore being blamed for mis-reading the market and over-estimating the interest of the big digital beasts —Amazon, Facebook and Netflix — having devised the two 20-match packages with online streaming in mind.
BT will have five matches from the split weekend, which will create a chance for a winter break
This will mean having access to all three services will cost fans just over £70 a month
But Scudamore tweaked Package G to include five weekend matches from the two split weekends to accommodate the winter break. And that helped BT agree to pay £90m and increase their output to 52 matches per season, for which they have paid a total of £975m over three years.
Sky, who are content with their four prime packages of 128 matches a season costing £3.5bn over three years, made no bid for either package. But BT were also in the market, allowing Scudamore to have competitive bidding when all had seemed lost. To complete Scudamore’s good day at the Premier League’s summer meeting in Harrogate, the clubs quickly brought an end to their impasse over the distribution of overseas rights income.
Within half an hour of the summit start, a new formula was announced whereby foreign rights money, in excess of the £3bn from the current deal, will be shared among the clubs on a sliding scale based on league position — this will be capped at the top club receiving 80 per cent more than the team who finish bottom.
The formula was based on central revenues from 2017-18, showing the highest earner Manchester United making 60 per cent more than the lowest earner Stoke.
Amazon's plunge into sports broadcasting
Amazon is becoming an increasing force in sport broadcasting and already have the rights for ATP and US Open tennis.
It also commissioned a £10m fly-on-the-wall documentary inside Manchester City during the title-winning campaign.
American Football is also broadcast on the website with the NFL renewing its deal to show Thursday night matches for two more seasons in April.
Amazon also produces a sporting documentary series titled 'All or Nothing'.
The programme takes viewers behind the scenes of three major American sports teams. Series have been focused on the Arizona Cardinals, the Los Angeles Rams and the Dallas Cowboys.
Said to be worth a staggering £521.98billion in February, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos claimed the Prime streaming service has more than 100 million subscribers worldwide in April.
Amazon is becoming an increasing force and already has rights for ATP and US Open tennis
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