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Premier League on TV will never be same again

NETFLIX has revolutionised the way we watch television. Spotify has made it easier and cheaper to listen to our favourite music wherever and whenever we want. Now, the landscape of how we watch Premier League football may just be about to change.

It was at a club shareholders meeting last year that Manchester United executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward declared that streaming live sport was the ‘future of content consumption’. He’s not alone in thinking it.

Amazon Prime will this week take those infant steps into the new world when it broadcasts all 10 Premier League midweek matches exclusively on its platform. The tech giants have paid an estimated £90million to show 20 games a season for the next three years.

Premier League bean counters have been hoping this day would come for a while. The league may be richer than ever, fuelled by a global television deal worth more than £9billion, but for the first time since 2004, the domestic rights failed to increase when the new deal was settled last year. Sky and BT paid a combined £700m less than they had before.

It is no surprise that the Premier League have turned to the TV and media world in their three failed attempts to appoint a new chief executive. Susanna Dinnage was originally named as Richard Scudamore’s successor but chose to stay at Discovery, BBC executive Tim Davie turned it down, before David Pemsel, formerly of the Guardian, resigned before starting the job after revelations about his private life.

If ever they manage to find someone able to start the job, the negotiations for the next deal which begin early next year, despite being only a year into the current one, will be high on the priority list. There is a feeling among industry experts that the value of domestic rights could continue to fall as fans find different — and, crucially, cheaper — ways to consume football. A report this month by finance company eToro found that the price of match tickets for the ‘dedicated fan’, one who goes to all 19 home games and at least five away games, has risen just one per cent since 2014-15. The price of a TV subscription has gone up 40 per cent.

‘ Premier League is t he crack cocaine of broadcasting but broadcasters have to be careful,’ said Kieran Maguire, lecturer in football finance at Liverpool University. ‘If they abuse fan loyalty with their pricing, people will just walk away.’

To watch Sky Sports on Sky costs about £40 a month if you include the standard monthly fees. On Virgin it’s nearer £70. The Sky Sports package on Now TV is £34 a month, or £199 for a 10-month season ticket if you bag the offer ahead of the season.

‘It’s a generational thing, too,’ added Maguire. ‘I don’t resent paying money if I get a good product in return. The issue with the likes of Sky is that they have not got their pricing right any more. They have not evolved. They need to be a bit more innovative.’

That has led to another huge issue for the Premier League: piracy.

Back in 2006, the music industry had a problem. Music lovers, instead of spending money on their favourite albums, were downloading them for free using file- sharing sites like Napster, LimeWire and The Pirate Bay, costing the industry in the US a billion dollars a year and the whole economy multiple times that.

Something had to change. So, in 2008, two Swedish entrepreneurs launched Spotify. Instead of buying individual singles or albums, people pay a small subscription each month for access to a huge library of songs, ad-free, or listen free with adverts.

‘The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry,’ said co-founder Daniel Ek in 2010. ‘That gave us Spotify.’

Now, Spotify boasts more than 100 million paid subscribers. Piracy, while not extinct, has fallen hugely.

Football finds itself forced into a similar corner. Every game is available around the world yet, in the country in which they are played, we still adhere to a prehistoric law banning domestic broadcasting of 3pm kick-offs. If a game is on in another country, though, there will be an online stream of it.

If you are a football fan, you will likely have heard of Kodi Boxes. You’ll know a friend who has one. You might have one. The legal multimedia boxes that people illegally load up with applications to let them stream matches to their televisions at a fraction of the cost, if any at all. Amazon’s Fire Sticks can also get patched. The Premier League, naturally, are trying to clamp down on it. One way to do so is to offer an alternative, reasonably priced with equal choice.

‘There is no such thing as exclusive rights because everything can be found within minutes, online for free,’ said Chris Tyas, global head of digital products at Eleven Sports. ‘ As a broadcaster that is very challenging, across all markets we are competing against a free product. If you want people to part with money your offering needs to be far superior.’

That’s where Amazon come in. That is where there is the chance to change the game. All 10 Premier League games are on offer, instead of the handful of games most weekends, as they will be in Amazon’s next set starting on Boxing Day. What you can expect from the coverage is explained above on this page.

For them, it will be interesting to see how viable it is. Their plan is to use Premier League matches to entice new users into a free trial to watch football, hoping they may find that they like the product and renew or, like many of us, forget to cancel.

From the Premier League’s point of view, it is great as well. Amazon are involved now and, if they make enough money, will be back at the table when the next deal is negotiated.

If it is a success, that may entice the likes of Netflix, Google or Facebook,

uninterested until now, to fancy a slice of the pie.

‘It will not be long until every match will be available across various subscription products,’ added Maguire.

There will be those who argue that another seat at the table just means that the devoted footballlover must shell out to yet another broadcaster if they want to watch every match possible. Yet the game has reached a point where broadcasters must change the way they treat customers. That’s what football fans are to them, after all.

This is its chance to start making the game more accessible and cheaper to those who have been taken advantage of for so long.