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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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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.
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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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.
No, it's a good deal for sports fans if everybody else helps pay for it.
If their market research indicates they can make a profit by streaming American Football and Baseball games into France, I am sure they will. But they should be under no obligation to do so. Why do you believe otherwise?
As a sports fan who chooses not to get screwed over by the cable or satellite TV companies, I don't have access to the ESPN app. Paying a couple bucks a month extra to Amazon for live sports would be well worth it to me vs paying for a cable subscription.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
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.
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Personally, I am a true sports fan, such that I own equipment and go play them with friends instead of sitting around watching other people play.
That's how I play too.
No, it's a good deal for sports fans if everybody else helps pay for it.
Agreed. While I suppose anything's possible, I cannot imagine that Amazon could keep the price of a Prime membership at $99 and ADD live sports (unless it gutted existing stuff included in Prime). Sports channels usually cost more than any other service in existing cable packages -- ESPN alone now charges about $7 per month from cable companies from subscribers. (Note that the MEDIAN fee per channel is about 15 cents.) And ESPN has huge ad revenue too. Is Prime going to make widespread use of ads too?
I know that the sports licensing folks are probably eager to reach cord-cutters, but I can't imagine they're going to settle for a fraction of what ESPN pulls in now... which means either Amazon's Prime cost goes way up to subsidize the sports package, or Amazon begins to offer a separate "Prime + Sports" package that costs more... perhaps double (or more) the current Prime cost.