After this season, Amazon will not a direct media partner of the Premier League – but maybe it doesn’t need to be any more. New deals with Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) and DAZN show where Prime Video’s future as an aggregator is going and, funnily enough, it looks a lot like what we’ve seen from linear television before.
By adding Discovery+, including the TNT Sports offering, and DAZN to Prime Channels in the UK, Amazon is allowing users to overcome fragmentation issues from both a usability and billing perspective. What’s more, ahead of the new Uefa Champions League season, Prime Video users will now have the ability to switch between live sports content from each broadcaster within the same application.
While the capability is contingent on users subscribing to Discovery+ or DAZN via Amazon’s platform, it does mean that the Prime Video app is an increasingly viable alternative to traditional pay-TV.
While customers of Sky, Virgin Media, EE TV or other pay-TV operators can also watch the entire Champions League in one place, this requires switching in and out of other smart TV apps – a demonstrably worse user experience.
Amazon has offered similar distribution agreements with Premier Sports and others for a while but these latest carriage deals feel like much more significant additions for Prime Video, especially with the seamless ability to switch between matches in-app.
As challengers in the UK to market-leading Sky, the expanded reach and potential revenue increases promised by Prime Channels is a win for both WBD and DAZN, whose NFL Game Pass add-on is now available to Amazon’s 13 million UK subscribers.
However, there is a deal that would tip over Prime Video from industry curiosity into something that could not be ignored – integrating Sky’s Now TV product into Channels. Aggregating Sky Sports into Prime would create the strongest streaming-only product for sports fans in the UK market by offering the only place to watch every available Premier League and Champions League game.
That might not happen soon, but it is the direction of travel. In France, DAZN is offering its Ligue 1 coverage via Prime Channels and given that BeIN Sports has a similar arrangement with Amazon for its Australian service, the Qatari pay-TV network could follow suit. Should that happen it would line up Prime Video’s nine million active French users alongside Canal+’s 10.6m subscribers as the broadest distribution platform for the top domestic soccer league.
Until the end of last season, of course, Prime Video was Ligue 1’s main broadcast partner in France. Now, without shelling out a hefty rights fee, Amazon is able to offer the same service, albeit at a higher cost to the fan. While rights acquisitions may remain part of the strategy for Amazon, it is clear the Prime Channels offering is the next phase of the platform’s evolution as a sports streaming service, becoming an aggregation product with a seamless, next generation user experience.
By SportsProMedia
