Amazon now, Apple next... watching TV sport is whole new ball game
ON THE face of things, it seems the most baffling sports deal yet.
The men’s tennis tournaments which shuttle Andy Murray, Roger Federer and Co between Madrid, Shanghai, Monte Carlo and Cincinnati will, from 2019, be brought to you by the firm best known to most of us as a source of those ubiquitous cardboard packages containing last-minute birthday presents.
Amazon has bid £10million-ayear for UK rights to the ATP World Tour, meaning an Amazon Prime Video subscription will soon be needed by anyone with more than a passing interest in men’s tennis.
And, as if to illustrate how the deal symbolises shifting tides in the way sport is viewed, the firm outbid by the Seattle- based former bookseller is Sky Sports — the broadcaster which took tennis coverage to new levels.
There are cost implications for those who want to watch the well-attended ATP World Tour Masters 1000 events which attract all the world’s best players.
The Amazon Prime subscription will be at least £5.99 a month — just the start of an outlay which the fracturing world of sports rights has heaped upon tennis devotees. Eurosport, which shows all four Grand Slams, will cost at least another £6.99 per month.
And a further £38.49 per month is the cost of a subscription to BT Sport, which screens 53 women’s tennis events. So, to see all televised tennis, it would cost £51.47 a month at today’s prices.
It is part of the very expensive story of how television is no longer king where watching sport is concerned. Only four years ago, two big beasts battled for customers, as BT — desperate about broadband and telephone customers seeping away to Sky — entered the market and drove the domestic Premier League TV rights deal to a stratospheric £8.3bn over three seasons. Sport is lucrative because it remains one of the only types of content which viewers will sit down in front of for an hour or two rather than record and watch later: an ‘appointment to view’ as they call it in the trade. But other players now want a piece of this action.
Amazon’s ultimate aim is still to make us order those cardboard packages. The average Amazon customer spends more than twice as much money once they have become a Prime subscriber.
James DeLorenzo, a veteran sports media executive of CBS and Sports Illustrated, has been quietly installed as head of sport for Amazon Video Channels.
The company is thought to have met with the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer. But they don’t want to risk revealing secrets of what is a test period for them and — unlike Sky and BT, who are happy to proclaim their achievements — will not discuss their sports plans with Sportsmail.
‘We have nothing to say,’ says a spokesman. The tennis deal follows a coup which, in April, saw the retailer pay £37.8m — five times the previous value — for the rights to stream 10 American Football Thursday night games.
The defeated competitors were Twitter and Facebook, two other players desperate for live sport to draw followers and advertisers.
Facebook streamed one Spanish La Liga game a week last season, as well as Mexican football’s Liga MX, which has a huge US following. Wayne Rooney’s testimonial drew 3.7m viewers last August when Facebook streamed it.
Twitter has been broadcasting one American Football game each week. It will screen live coverage of ‘marquee groups’ at golf’s US PGA Championship in the UK next week after Sky lost exclusive broadcast rights.
THEend of each day’s action will also be shown on BBC2, while Give Me Sport’s Facebook page will also stream live coverage.
Netflix is expected to make the same play for sport to entice customers to its own subscription service but remains equally unwilling to talk. ‘No comment.’
Everyone might be shadowboxing, but Amazon’s tennis move sends a warning shot to its digital rivals. And it also gives Sky Sports and BT Sport cause to shiver.
Demands for their own TV services have fallen, in part because of a new millennial generation who are deserting the TV set in favour of hand-held devices and digital media.
‘The conundrum is how people want to consume what used to be a must-watch offering and no longer is,’ says Daniel Geey, industry expert at the Sheridans law firm. The big beasts say they are ready for the interlopers. Sky’s internet service Now TV is in its fourth year and the broadcaster has a vast Snapchat audience — 75 per cent of whom are under 25 — by sending goal clips into the channel a few days after games.
But it is a measure of Sky’s almighty clamour for viewers that they recently abandoned their numerical channels in favour of sport-specific channels, creating cheaper options for those who, perhaps, only want football. The broadcaster’s need to cut costs to pay for Premier League TV rights has forced brutal decisions. Sky have dumped tennis entirely.
Channel 4 reaped the benefit of outbidding the BBC for the women’s Euro 2017, winning a peak 3.3million viewers for England’s quarter-final against France, twice the number of a typical Premier League game on Sky or BT Sport.
But Sky’s one- sport channels could create an environment of winners and losers. ‘It exposes a rights holder if not enough people are watching. If numbers drop, it’s an easy way of dropping the sport,’ says Jim Dowling, managing director of Havas SE Cake, sponsorship experts. Dowling says Amazon’s arrival on the scene is ‘the perfect scenario’ for the Premier League, ahead of the next rights bidding round.
‘The Premier League will want Amazon in the rights bidding next time,’ Dowling says. ‘If you want something that is going to drive subscriptions substantially, you will have to offer something that is appealing enough to do it.
‘The real excitement is to come from further rights deals.’
Dowling believes Apple will enter the market, for identical motives, though they have not revealed their hand yet.
It all adds up to sport becoming very expensive. Want to be totally covered for the coming season’s football? That will be £74.98 per month: £42m for Sky Sports, £22.99 for BT Sport Sky customers, and £9.99 for Premier Sports.
Yet the competition is creating better quality than ever. Sky’s golf coverage this summer included the bunker cam and for the new football season, its football app will allow subscribers to pause and rewind games. Amazon will soon be at the gates but breaking them down will be another story.