While Sports Television keeps evolving, the tender for broadcast rights of the Premier League is underway, a process that will certainly shake outdated restricted television broadcasters in the streaming era.
Now, Amazon is interested in competing for the Premier League broadcast rights. During the last tender, broadcasting rights for 2016-2019 were awarded in the U.K. for the following amounts: SKY Sports TV , five thousand seven hundred million dollars, for five of the seven packages available and BT Sports , one thousand three hundred million dollars for the remainder.
Amazon is way beyond those figures and not only for the U.K., as it is looking for a global awarding, though the NBC went ahead of them and signed a contract extension through 2022.
Amazon was founded in 1995 by Jeffrey Bezos , in Washington, Seattle, with the purpose of making books available via an online catalog. A simple idea: a book delivery service which succeeded and generates over USD$135,000m profit per year, becoming the largest and most successful online store on the planet. The place where you can buy either a book or a robot if you like.
With a surplus like this, Amazon decided to launch a streaming service some years ago, the Amazon Prime, with over 80 million subscribers in the U.S. alone. In England, Amazon Prime offers live streaming channels such as Discovery, Eurosport, among others, with the advantage of subscribing and unsubscribing at one’s will, without financial penalties of any kind, nor annoying cable tricks or questionable satellite connections on behalf of cable companies.
In the second semester of 2017, Amazon engaged in NFL live broadcasts -via streaming- to test whether this effort would prove successful outside a traditional TV broadcast scheme, something very similar to which Twitter endeavored months earlier.
Amazon disbursed USD$50m for ten Thursday Night Football games and charged his advertisers USD$2.8m for a 30 second TV ad broadcast. Twitter reportedly experienced a lesser impact than Amazon which reached 243 people per minute, a considerably large audience.
Sports broadcasts do not remain the same. Traditional broadcast services are left behind by millionaire streaming services, which not only offer live transmissions but can rely on a huge storage capacity that enables viewers to watch the games at their convenience and immense gratitude.
Amazon’s great test will come with the Manchester City ’s series, in preparations for next summer, and for which the U.S.A. giant disbursed over US$13m. The series is a day to day portrait of Pep Guardiola ’s team. What is certain is that Amazon , Netflix , Twitter , and Facebook are the new means for sports broadcasting and if they failed to be so in the short run, we just have to wait and see.