Amazon has secured the last remaining package of broadcasting rights to the English Premier League in a landmark three-year deal.
The online retailer turned streaming giant has broken the dominance of Sky and BT Sport and will become the first internet platform to broadcast live Premier League games.
The livestream will be available for free to any existing Amazon Prime subscribers, and fans will have to sign up to that service to access the games if they aren’t already subscribers.
The deal only covers 20 games, the first round of midweek fixtures in December and all 10 matches on 26 December for the next three-years.
Amazon already owns the rights to show the US Open tennis tournament in the UK, along with the men’s ATP World Tour and N.F.L.’s Thursday Night Games.
An analyst at CCS Insight, Paolo Pescatore, says the Premier League is a wholly different situation for Amazon compared to its other sports offerings. “We are talking about a six-digit numbers in terms of cost to broadcast and produce a game.”
This is much more expensive than tennis rights for example, as Amazon just takes the professionally produced content from elsewhere and streams it themselves.
Ed Barton, an analyst at Ovum, suggests that Amazon will use this relatively small scale deal to hone their product in time for when the next tranche of TV rights are up for grabs three years from now.
The full packages are as follows:
Package A – won by BT
32 matches on Saturdays at 12:30
Package B – won by Sky Sports
32 matches on Saturdays at 17:30
Package C – won by Sky Sports
24 matches on Sundays at 14:00 and eight matches on Saturdays at 19:45
Package D – won by Sky Sports
32 matches on Sundays at 16:30
Package E – won by Sky Sports
24 matches on Mondays at 20:00 or Fridays at 19:30/20:00 and eight matches on Sundays at 14:00
Package F – won by Amazon
10 matches from one Bank Holiday and all 10 from the Boxing Day fixture programme
Package G – won by BT
20 matches from two midweek fixture programmes
