News out of the UK today is that Amazon has reached a five-year exclusive rights deal to show the US Open tennis tournament in Britain:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/19/amazon-prime-100-m-subscribers-video-music-streaming-netflix
This seems like a significant landmark in the sports television world, and one with very interesting ramifications going forward. The company for which I do most of my sports commentary work at the moment, DAZN, fancies itself as "the Netflix of sport" and has acquired a huge array of rights packages - mostly across non-primary sports in its respective countries - across its current territories of Canada, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Japan. And I understand DAZN has plans to begin operating in the US as well, although I struggle to envision how DAZN might work in the US given the abundance of competition among network and cable television stations. (I have zero inside knowledge about DAZN's plans, although one model that I think might work would involve packaging various League Pass-type properties for the various major sports under a single banner and at a discount price.) Elsewhere, the NFL has experimented with offering Thursday night games online, albeit always with a network TV alternative, and in the UK Amazon is apparently bidding for at least one tranche of English Premiership soccer rights, so it's not just the lesser sports potentially moving online.
What do we think about all of this, both in the US and elsewhere? The sports television rights bubble is bound to burst eventually - network contracts can't keep increasing year after year after year (can they?), unless non-traditional and super-rich competitors like Amazon enter the fray. At the same time, the example of English cricket might be worth noting: in recent history, cricket arguably never more popular in Britain than it was in 2005, when England defeated Australia in arguably the best series ever to regain the coveted Ashes trophy, but that Ashes series was the last cricket to be shown on English terrestrial television, and when the rights reverted to Sky and satellite companies (satellite TV being far less ubiquitous in the UK than cable is in the US), the extra money paid by Sky was readily received, but cricket itself was dealt a significant blow and has really fallen down the pecking order of sports popularity in the UK, both in terms of people watching it on TV and regarding the number of young people taking up the game.
Where do you think all of this is going?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/19/amazon-prime-100-m-subscribers-video-music-streaming-netflix
This seems like a significant landmark in the sports television world, and one with very interesting ramifications going forward. The company for which I do most of my sports commentary work at the moment, DAZN, fancies itself as "the Netflix of sport" and has acquired a huge array of rights packages - mostly across non-primary sports in its respective countries - across its current territories of Canada, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Japan. And I understand DAZN has plans to begin operating in the US as well, although I struggle to envision how DAZN might work in the US given the abundance of competition among network and cable television stations. (I have zero inside knowledge about DAZN's plans, although one model that I think might work would involve packaging various League Pass-type properties for the various major sports under a single banner and at a discount price.) Elsewhere, the NFL has experimented with offering Thursday night games online, albeit always with a network TV alternative, and in the UK Amazon is apparently bidding for at least one tranche of English Premiership soccer rights, so it's not just the lesser sports potentially moving online.
What do we think about all of this, both in the US and elsewhere? The sports television rights bubble is bound to burst eventually - network contracts can't keep increasing year after year after year (can they?), unless non-traditional and super-rich competitors like Amazon enter the fray. At the same time, the example of English cricket might be worth noting: in recent history, cricket arguably never more popular in Britain than it was in 2005, when England defeated Australia in arguably the best series ever to regain the coveted Ashes trophy, but that Ashes series was the last cricket to be shown on English terrestrial television, and when the rights reverted to Sky and satellite companies (satellite TV being far less ubiquitous in the UK than cable is in the US), the extra money paid by Sky was readily received, but cricket itself was dealt a significant blow and has really fallen down the pecking order of sports popularity in the UK, both in terms of people watching it on TV and regarding the number of young people taking up the game.
Where do you think all of this is going?
