Amazon plans to bid on the rights to stream Premier League matches

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Amazon plans to bid on the rights to stream Premier League matches

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Amazon plans to bid for the rights to stream Premier League matches in the UK next month, when the auction for the rights begins, Bloomberg reports.

During the last Premier League rights auction in 2015, UK pay-TV broadcasters Sky and BT paid a combined £5.1 billion ($6.9 billion) for the TV rights over three seasons. Sky won the rights to stream 126 games per season, while the figure was 42 for BT.

Amazon isn’t the only tech giant that’s expected to bid for the next round of Premier League rights. Facebook has also been involved in the conversation as a possible bidder. The deep pockets of Facebook and Amazon position them well to compete for Premier League rights, and will likely drive up the price of the rights in the process. Citi analysts have projected the price of Premier League rights to increase 40% from the $5.6 billion Sky paid in 2015.

Here are two key reasons it makes sense for Amazon to bid on Premier League rights:

It can lure more UK Prime subscribers. The Premier League is by far the world’s richest football league, according to Deloitte per The Guardian, which speaks to its global popularity. Securing the rights to Premier League streams in the UK can incentivize more Prime signups, which are highly valuable for Amazon — Prime members spend almost twice as much per year on Amazon versus non-Prime subscribers, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Forty-three percent of Amazon’s UK purchasers were Prime members in Q1 2017.
Amazon can continue to build out its live sports offering. The company has been focused on acquiring sports rights — Amazon outbid Sky in August 2017 for the UK rights to the ATP World Tour, in a deal estimated to be worth £10 million ($13.3 million) per year, for example. Additionally, the company streamed 10 Thursday Night FootballNFL games during the 2017 season. In pursuing this strategy, Amazon can cater to viewers vying for cheaper alternatives to linear TV that still want to view live sports content. Moreover, live sports is a primary motivator keeping US consumers tethered to their pay-TV subscriptions, according to a survey by PwC, meaning acquiring more sports rights will be important for OTT services to entice cable subscribers to cut the cord.

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