Slashdot Mirror
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.
Having zero interest in watching sports, it already burns my ass to be paying a "Sports Fee" on my Comcast bill. I don't want any portion of my Amazon Prime payment going to professional sports.
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.
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
Please don't. Live sport are extremely expensive and just push up the price for us that don't give a monkeys.
I thought the convention was to use brown for this type of story.
(shrugs) Their site, their rules.
When they rose the price of Prime from £49 to £79 and bundled in Prime Video I wasn't all that happy and until Grand Tour was released I had yet in the years since that increase to find a program I wanted to watch on there. I'd check, see if it was on Amazon or Netflix before often purchasing it on Google Play.
But 90% of the time that a show is actually on there it's not included. I wanted to watch Stargate SG1 the other day and they're charging £2.50 per episode, no offer to buy by the season (and the US price is listed as $1.99 but I bet that doesn't include VAT)
A separate site of what's available as part of the subscription would be good, tying it in with Amazon's full site doesn't help.
Meh. MotoGP has offered a season streaming subscription for years.
If Dakar did the same, I'd be set.
As a sports fan, I would be OK with Amazon offering live sports, as long as it doesn't require non-sports fans to subsidize my enjoyment. But that's a little bit like me saying because I don't like the Gilmore Girls and Two Broke Girls, I shouldn't have to subsidize the people that watch those programs.
But Amazon streaming video, including live sporting events, has one big issue to iron out, and that's Google. Right now, I pay to be able to watch giant men give each other brain damage on my home television and on my Android devices. Unfortunately, because Google and Amazon are having a pissing contest about putting Amazon video streaming apps on my Android devices, the only way for me to watch Amazon Prime video on my Android devices is to do a side-chain installation of something called "Amazon Underground" which wants access to my contacts and SMS messages and even the photos on my phone. When I try to turn those permissions off, Amazon Underground doesn't work and I can't watch Prime video.
I understand that by using Android and Google I'm making myself part of the product that Google is selling. I don't want to do the same with Amazon, since I'm actually paying them money for Amazon Prime.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you want to offer a service on the INTERnet you'd better make sure it's also INTERnational
Price will have to go in some areas local rsn's have high costs. /mo just for 1 team and in all the other area RSN's and it's about $8-$15 /mo
Sports net LA is $4.50-$5.00
CSN Chicago is about $3-$5 /mo and if the cubs start there own RSN they may want $2-$4 /mo.
'*BSD Sux0rs'. This and piss c0cktail.
Well, if I'm going to be paying for sports as part of my annual membership, I will reconsider subscribing to Amazon Prime. I have no interest in subsidizing such things for others, and no interest in wasting a moment of my time on that nonsense. The whole point of cutting the cord is being able to get what you want, without paying for what you don't. I see no compelling reason to dump one bundle on cable, just to get saddled with another from Amazon.
Sports and Disney are the reason for the major price hikes in traditional TV service. If they can provide the sports without causing price hikes in prime membership, or make it a separate package to add on so those who don't want this content aren't helping to subsidize it, id say go for it. Otherwise adding sports is just going to put amazon into the same position that caused people to become cord cutters to begin with.
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.
I'd like to know how they expect to pay for licensing all of this sports content without severely impacting the price. Currently if you want to watch hockey online, your only option is NHL Center Ice. It costs $220 for the season ($18 per month), and you don't get playoff or locally broadcast (including cable) games. To add something like a major pro sport onto the pricing that people expect from Amazon Prime, the league owners would have to drastically change the way they do things. Not to mention that there are existing licensing deals in place which would make it impossible for Amazon to secure rights to pro sports within the next 5 years.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
HGTV has its own streaming service
The link "Sign In to Your Provider" at the top of this page makes me think HGTV streaming is yet another "TV Everywhere" that requires authenticating a subscription to a package on a traditional multichannel pay television (that is, cable or satellite) provider that includes HGTV. The FAQ backs this up.
So a computer literate audience... and the want to sell them sports?
I'm guessing this is to appeal to, what? Brogrammers?
The dinosaurs in charge of Major League Baseball will almost certainly insist on only allowing streaming access to games outside of your local market - basically the same thing as they enforce with their MLB.tv product.
The fundamental problem is that a huge chunk of most team's (and the leagues') profits come from cable tv deals, so MLB insists on pretending that the cable tv market is still thriving. I can only offer one data point, but I decided a couple years ago it wasn't worth paying an extra $65-$70 a month just for the privilege of watching my local baseball team... so we dumped the Comcast plan we were on, and moved to a deal that was basically internet access with local channels (plus HBO for some reason) thrown in for free.
What's especially stupid is that the carriage fee Comcast pays the Seattle Mariners / MLB for the rights to carry their games is about $5 a month. I'd gladly pay that fee, on top of an MLB.tv subscription, to stream my local games in an aboveboard manner - but there's no option for that. If you don't buy the big 80+ channel "premium" cable package, there's no way to watch local games (with MLB's blessing, anyway).
Now what some people do (not anyone I know, of course) is buy MLB.tv, then either watch through some proxy or else use a location faker on their mobile device. That gives problem-free access to their local team's games. It's easy to do - or at least that's what I've read on the internet somewhere. You'd think MLB would want that market... but I suspect they pretend all those MLB.tv subscribers are buying the service just so they can watch some far-away team's games.
#DeleteChrome
As a cord cutter, yes please.
As a sports fan, EXTRA yes please.
Slight tangent, but one of the problems facing several sports today is ridiculously over-inflated salaries:
-This leads to rule changes to prevent injury: can't have your bazillion dollar player getting hurt.
-And that's gonna pump up owner salaries... can't have "just" a multi-millionaire owner presiding over millionaire players... no no no
-It leads to god awful sponsorship deals by the players: "Eat Papa Johns pizza, I swear it's not garbage," (it is). Gotta keep that lifestyle rolling after you retire
-And there are even worse sponsorship deals by the teams: "Welcome to the Bank of America field in Ford Arena -built ford tough-. Now lets watch the Monster Energy Drink replay highlights sponsored by Samsung."
The list goes on and on, I could be here all day. But if we can allow non-fans to stop paying for sports packages, the ship might right itself. It'll take a while, players are going to have to stop being "the highest paid whatever" every single year, but we actually have a chance of getting back on course with players playing for the love of the game, instead of the pursuit of the money.
This signature is false.
Bah, wake me up when Amazon broadcasts the World Cup with non-US English commentators. Then, I'll be interested.
The second I can watch my favorite basketball team without having to pay for 200 other channels I don't want. I will tell Direct TV where they can put their satellite.
I cancelled my satellite, because I got tired of subsidizing all of the sports fans. Their movie and TV show catalog is pretty pathetic as is. And more and more, I'm not even getting the two day shipping I was promised. If Amazon goes this route, I'll cancel the first time I see an increase in the membership costs. I was already on the fence as is.
I just did. I enough of us complain to Amazon directly about not wanting to pay for sports, that might help. Ranting here is less effective...