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Originally Posted by Horizon
Not sure I understand your case here, jfman.
You mention 25 million homes, but 25 million homes don't take Sky Sports, so I don't understand why you quote that figure.
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If we leave football briefly to the side:
If the aim is cross selling Prime and using that to drive sales on the website (and profits that way) then 25 million Prime subscriptions is surely the target for the business - everyone buying as much as they can all the time on Amazon. How do we get from 6 to 25 (or as near 25 as possible, I accept 100% is unrealistic in all cases) in the most cost effective way?
To bring football back in: would football be a driver to deliver that, or as close to that, as possible at a cost in excess of £5bn?
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UK Prime subs are already higher than those paying for Sky Sports in the UK (I think??), so the quickest way for Amazon to make the rights pay would be a direct conversion of those Sky and BT customers paying for sports over to Prime. But there are other ways they all do it too, like I mentioned the other day from targetable ads, to flogging stuff from their website.
Why do you think Amazon (or any other streamer, if they were to be the successful bidder) would fail if it gained sports rights, when it's been so good for Sky and BT?
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I haven’t said they’d fail outright. It’s high risk, low (if any) reward in a three year rights window. I don’t think you’d get a 1:1 conversion of a Sky Sports subscriber to an Amazon package - how many Sky Sports customers subscribe for the rest of the content or the overall bundle, how many are on bundle deals with Sky/Virgin so what’s the net cost - what will they get rid of ultimately and are they willing to pay the new total price?
On day 1 you’re losing money straight away until you reach the break even point. You’d really be looking at getting 6 million subscribers to pay in excess of £25 a month to cover the costs. You don’t have a 7 day a week channel and don’t have content in half of May, all of June or July. I don’t think that’s so straightforwardly achievable anyone would take the gamble.
I don’t think there’s “new” subscribers to the market out there vying for this price point - it’s more expensive (twice the price!) than the 9 month Now TV pass that floats about and it has Football League, F1, etc.
I think if it was achievable the Premier League would have done it themselves on a platform neutral basis as far back as the ITV Digital days.
The risk of a new entrant was deemed so low by Sky they bid even less than last time and won a better share of the rights.
I think I’ve said on this forum (or possibly on another) a new entrant needs a five/ten year window to operate without the uncertainty they are left in year 4 scrambling for a new business model having lost the rights a la Setanta.