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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.
And for me that sort of thing isn't going to work since I do not feel a need to purchase their other services.
Part of the reason why we don't have pay-TV is that I do not want to pay a fairly large amount of money for something that I don't have interest in watching. I have even less interest in paying for something like this that also serves ads. Doesn't really matter what it is either.
As I see it there are two extremes in television distribution that establish a gradient. First is the free-to-the-viewer model. This is broadcast TV. The viewer has no choice but to receive ads, but the viewer doesn't pay for content outside of watching ads and pays for nothing short purchase of one's own receiving equipment. The advertiser is the entity that pays for the service in effect. The second is the viewer-paid-ad-free model. The viewer's subscription fee pays for the content delivery and the content and there are no ads.
The gradient lies in between these two positions. Inexpensive pay-TV like conventional cable or satellite requires the viewer to pay for the medium and requires the viewer to put up with ads. In turn the networks sell ads and negotiate with the medium (the "cable company") to have the network available to the viewer. More expensive pay-TV like premium cable or satellite requires the viewer to pay for the medium and to pay for individual networks on top of the base rate.
The problem is when networks like ESPN end up negotiating with the cable companies to where all subscribers pay for this premium network (and I call it that based on the per-subscriber fee required of all viewing households) even though a lot of people don't want to watch the network at all. I don't want to pay $5 - $10 per month because my cable TV company has a bad deal with ESPN where they have to pay for ESPN on my behalf whether or not I want to watch it. Throw on top of that the ads ESPN sells and airs and it's frankly insulting.
If Amazon tries to force Prime into an all-or-nothing proposition like the cable and satellite companies have then I have no reason to bother giving them my money. After all, if I want an all-or-nothing scenario where I'm actively paying for content that I don't want I can get that treatment from existing players. The only way I would consider Prime is if I can choose what I subscribe to. Amazon might have arrangements to the networks funded by the wholly-ad-supported-model like current conventional cable, but I don't have to fork over cash for those. If I don't want ESPN I don't want to pay for it anyway.
I suppose it shows how much a house of cards networks like ESPN are, if they don't have the compulsory model for subscription payments from people that have no interest then they probably wouldn't manage to stay in business.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I don't want a year or a month of MLB. I want to buy by the game. Charge me a buck or two for a single ball game. No monthly or annual fee (above the Amazon Prime fee), and let me just watch what I want, when I want, and pay for just that. Hell, I'll throw in an extra buck per game if you fill the "ad space" time with a single Amazon ad and then run sports highlights during the teevee timeouts.
Support a few technologists in Washington.