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Online giant agrees three-year £90m deal to stream 20 Premier League matches a season from 2019-20
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 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.
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.
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.