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Amazon Wants To Include Live Sports as Part of Prime Membership (geekwire.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon's next Prime membership benefit could be the ability to stream live sports. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Amazon is in talks with leagues like the NFL, NBA, MLB, and a handful of others about live game rights. The fact that Amazon wants to stream live sports isn't a new development. But the Journal did have a noteworthy tidbit: Amazon could offer a "premium, exclusive sports package" to those who pay for a $99 per year, or $8.99 per month, Prime membership. Amazon is exploring streaming rights to multiple sports at a variety of levels. The Journal reported that Amazon wanted to exclusively license NBA's League Pass streaming product; it is also reaching out to traditional broadcasters like Univision and ESPN about the content they own but don't end up airing on TV.Amazon was also recently exploring deals with Indian Premier League, a cricket match league. In a recent interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker, Reed Hastings said that one of the most difficult decisions for him has been to not do live sports. He said Netflix doesn't want to move away from movies and TV shows, and only focus on improving the quality of the shows and user experience.
This is the last difficult part of being a cord cutter (if one cares about this kind of content). One can get just about any other set of content from streaming if it's available at all (there are always holes, mind you). I don't envy the rights negotiations, as they are a mess, but it would solve a major problem in the lineup of content.
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Yes, this is a good deal for sports fans if and only of the sports premium is optional.
I agree with OP and say Amazon needs to go one step further. The original thing about Prime was the 2 day shipping. That's all I am really interested in... not their tv shit, streaming shit, sports shit, and probably soon-to-be tax preparation service or whatever they come up with next
Prime needs to be split into two tiers... one for the free shipping, at a reduced cost, and a premium tier with all the other add-on shit.
So then what? Prime becomes $150/mo? We're back to cable again.. Live sports are expensive. Since I don't watch it I don't want to pay.
I doubt that's going to happen. The 2-day shipping is a loss-leader to get you introduced (and hopefully hooked) on the rest of Amazon's ecosystem.
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No, it's a good deal for sports fans if everybody else helps pay for it.