What can Amazon do to draw more customers to its Prime service, which combines shipping discounts with streaming video and other perks in a $99/year subscription? Amazon is reportedly negotiating to carry live streaming video for Prime customers, potentially including events like tennis, golf, soccer, rugby, and auto racing,
Either because Amazon hopes to sell these streams to a global audience or because rights to the most popular U.S. sports are tied up in long contracts, some of those ever-resourceful “people with knowledge of the matter” told Bloomberg Technology that the company’s main targets for sporting events have international appeal, like the French Open or professional rugby matches.
Amazon woudl be seeking rights to more popular sports in this country like baseball or basketball, but they’re generally tied up in existing contracts and not on the market.
There are other ways to offer sports, too: Amazon could sell subscriptions to sports leagues’ existing streaming services through the Prime Video platform, as it does with subscriptions to Showtime, Starz, SeeSo, Acorn, and other outside services.
Sports would be just another channel on the Amazon Prime service….which sounds a little bit like cable TV now, doesn’t it? Another option would be to secure the rights to enough events to create a separate Amazon Sports product and sell that as an add-on to Prime subscriptions or even on its own.
How much all this would cost would depend,of course, on which sports the service manages to secure, if any, and how expensive they normally are. Sports are usually the most expensive part of a standard cable package.
Amazon Said to Seek Sports Streaming Rights From Tennis to Rugby [Bloomberg Technology]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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