Amazon Looking To Expand Prime Into Live-Streamed Major Sports
from the play-ball! dept
For some time now, I’ve been ringing the warning bell for cable television providers that the cord-cutting trend has only thus far been prevented from becoming a deluge by live sporting events. It’s one thing to watch TV dramas and reality programming either in binge-fashion or streaming days after the original television airing, but live sports is still a major draw for cable TV audiences. Because of the combination of broadcast partner deals many of the leagues have worked out with cable providers and the nature of the sports product, this may be the last bastion of hope for cable TV as we know it today.
But that thread of survival continues to unravel. In the past two years or so, we’ve seen the major athletic leagues begin to open up on the concept of live-streaming games. The NFL was among the first of the major players to ink toe-in-the-water streaming deals, but the NBA and MLB have followed closely behind. And while those deals are meager and fragmented in terms of the streaming providers in question, it’s worth noting that Amazon is reportedly targeting sports streaming generally as a way to expand its Prime product.
Amazon apparently never stops thinking about possible perks it could add to its annual $99 Prime membership, and the next feature could be live sports. A report from The Wall Street Journal suggests that Amazon is in talks with professional sport organizations including Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, and the National Football League to negotiate the rights to stream live games and events.
According to the report, Amazon is looking at creating a premium sports package that it could include in Amazon Prime memberships. If it comes to fruition, a sports package could draw a lot of new customers to Prime, which already offers free two-day shipping, Amazon Video streaming of TV shows and movies, music streaming with Prime Music, the Prime Reading library of free e-books, and more. It would also be a big way for Prime to stand out among other streaming services, particularly Netflix, which has steered clear of sports since most people don’t want to watch a football game after it’s over.
The barrier to all of this, of course, is that those leagues already have broadcast deals in place with television providers. That is particularly the case with the MLB and the NBA, which both rely heavily on cable networks to broadcast their games. The NFL, on the other hand, has long partnered with the “local” national networks, CBS, NBC, and Fox. It therefore may have more room in which to wriggle into streaming sports, demonstrated by the fact that it has already done so in its Yahoo! deal. Regardless, one of the streaming titans getting into sports streaming, should it happen, should be setting off all kinds of warning bells for the cable companies.
In a time when streaming services are incredibly popular, live sports is a major reason people still pay for pricey cable packages. A good example is DirecTV, which saw a big subscriber bump when it began offering the premium NFL Sunday Ticket package.
With the market penetration for smart TVs and devices that allow streaming to be beamed to non-smart TVs, this interest by Amazon represents a major landshift in the cable TV market. Streaming services like Prime can be more nimble with pricing, as well, as they don’t have to adhere to the practices of packaging undesirable content along with the channels and shows that consumers actually want. And, what’s more, Amazon’s interest here is likely to spur its competition to get into sports streaming as well, if only to keep up with the Amazonian Joneses.
Even if this takes a while to get rolled out due to existing broadcast contracts, the end may be nigh for cable television as it currently exists.
Filed Under: live sports, sports, streaming
Companies: amazon
Comments on “Amazon Looking To Expand Prime Into Live-Streamed Major Sports”
Amazonian Joneses!!!
Huge points for working that phrase into the article….funny!
Hrumph
I already don’t pay to watch major league sports and I already don’t have cable TV. I don’t care if Amazon prime starts including some except if it raises the cost of it, in which case I’ll stop Amazon Prime.
There’s a reason I don’t watch Major league sports and don’t have cable. I don’t want to give them my money because I think they are all being immature money grabbing jerks that rip me off.
I try to normally be a very nice person, kind, thoughtful, considerate. Except when someone tries to take advantage of me, or cheat me. After I’ve made sure it wasn’t an honest mistake, I try to be the worst nightmare they’ve ever had and make them wish they had never, not ever, been born. And I would never willingly do business with them again.
The next anti-competitive action by cable companies is to warn Amazon that they can slow down and make unreliable access to all Amazon shopping pages, unless they give up on this idea
/cartel theory
Amazing
Amazing how the US thinks that its sugar coated sporting “products” are somehow important. The rest of the world doesn’t understand them and cares even less.
However the use of sports “rights” as a toehold and a lever to bully people into taking up a new service is quite a traditional thing now. It is the way in which satellite and cable got off the ground here in the UK.
Of case the basic model is usually not to “offer something new” but rather to take something familiar away from its traditional venue in an attempt to force people to take up a new service. That is how Rupert Murdoch bullied his way in to the UK TV scene.
So long as the cable companies continue to show the events Amazon’s offering will not make a huge impact.
What they need to do is to put up a big enough bribe to the sports associations to get themselves an exclusive deal. If that happens then it really is curtains for the cable providers.
If you are simply
Re: Amazing
“Amazing how the US thinks that its sugar coated sporting “products” are somehow important.”
It’s possible that they’ve been led to believe this by the billions of dollars that those sports bring in.
And while I’m here: Twitter has streamed NFL Thursday night games this season, and it’s pretty great. The only problem is that Twitter has no discovery mechanism, so it’s un-scalable without an complete UI overhaul.
It’s been past time cable companies break down their channels into ‘producers’ that make their content available via the service in both live (in a traditional channel setup) or via archive. Frees cable bandwidth and lets people watch what their stuff when they want. Win-win.
They could be at least half a decade ahead.
Re: Re:
Without cable packages, how will they fund all those channels that nobody watches?
Just think of the jobs, dependent on copyright, that would be lost if they ceased to exist./s
It makes more sense when you call it “cord switching” rather than cord cutting. There are two reasons:
First is that they generally turn off cable but pay for a higher internet connectivity tier (generally from the same company), and second because they end up paying a third party for the content anyway.
It’s just not clear that net-net they are really saving all that much, and clearly there is still a cord.
Better watch live sports online: http://livesports.one/
No fee