Amazon has broken Sky and BT’s stranglehold on Premier League football by striking a groundbreaking deal to livestream exclusive coverage of 20 matches a season online.
The US company will exclusively show all 10 matches over one bank holiday and another 10 during one midweek fixture programme, for three seasons from 2019. The value of the deal was not disclosed.
Amazon said the matches would be available to UK Prime Video members at no extra cost to their existing subscription.
BT has bought the other remaining rights package, paying £90m over three years for exclusive live coverage of 20 midweek Premier League games a season. From August 2019, BT will show 52 live games a season at a cost of £975m over three years, and Sky 128, paying £3.75bn.
It is the first time packages of livestreaming matches have been offered by the Premier League, under a strategy introduced by the chief executive, Richard Scudamore. He has been seeking to lure a deep-pocketed technology company such as Amazon, Facebook, YouTube or Netflix to help continue to drive up earnings from media rights.
Amazon has been in negotiations about the packages for months – against rivals including BT – after the completion of the sale of the most valuable TV rights in February.
The Premier League was unable to achieve the price it was seeking for the streaming packages, with bidders unable to see how to make a return on having two rounds of matches a season.
Global players such as Amazon prefer multi-country or worldwide deals to make the economics work, which is how Netflix can afford to spend £100m a season on shows such as The Crown.
The deal adds to Amazon’s burgeoning local sports rights portfolio, with the UK becoming a major focus.
In April, it paid tens of millions of dollars for the exclusive UK rights to the US Open tennis, giving subscribers who pay £79 a year for its Prime Video service access to three of the four grand slams. A deal with Eurosport provides access to the Australian and French Opens.
Amazon also outbid Sky in a £50m deal for the UK rights to the ATP World Tour, a men’s global competition featuring Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray.
The recent deals, which have been struck by the Amazon Prime Europe Video chief, Jay Marine, and the European Prime Video Live Sports chief, Alex Green , include a $130m (£97m) renewal of non-exclusive livestreaming of NFL games. Earlier this year, Facebook struck an exclusive deal to stream some Major League Baseball matches, and last year, it was frustrated in a $600m bid to secure streaming rights to Indian Premier League cricket matches.
The best five of the seven packages of Premier League football rights, allowing live TV coverage of more than 200 matches a season from 2019 to 2022, were sold in February, with Sky and BT dividing the spoils.
Sky took four of the best five at a 14% discount on its current deal. BT secured the other prime package. After Thursday’s rights deal, BT will be paying £975m over three years for 52 games a season from 2019, compared with £960m for 42 currently.
The rivalry between Sky and BT in recent years has resulted in price inflation of 70% at each of the past two auctions. The total cost of the rights has rocketed from £1.78bn for 2010-13 to £5.13bn for 2018-19.
Subscribers to Amazon’s Prime service, which includes perks such as free product delivery and access to free music, are hugely valuable, because they spend twice as much with Amazon as non-subscribers.
The company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, recently said there are more than 100 million Prime subscribers globally, and he is keenly focused on building the value of the service, including through TV content deals. Last year, he ordered executives to find a Game of Thrones-style global hit, resulting in an estimated $1bn deal to bring a Lord of the Rings spinoff to TV.
