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Originally Posted by jfman
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?
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Ok I think I understand, it is late.
You're basically saying that you reckon Amazon wants every UK home to be a Prime subscriber and that's something I agree with, based on what Amazon have said themselves. Amazon have said they want us all to view them as like a utility which becomes a "must have" service.
How do they go from 6 to 25?? They already have the 25. Something like 90% of UK internet users have bought something from Amazon, so they already have the card details of the other millions more people and they can market to those other people and try and covert them to Prime customers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
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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Don't know, but I'm thinking that Amazon's goal would be to knock out BT and Sky here as competitors and try and poach as many of their customers as possible.
What we don't know is how many today already take both Sky Sports and Amazon Prime.
---------- Post added at 23:47 ---------- Previous post was at 23:33 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
I haven’t said they’d fail outright. It’s high risk, low 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?
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I agree that its risky, but much of that risk has already been removed as essentially Sky has created the market for pay sports. Amazon have just got to poach those customers and convert them onto its own service.
Sports is still priced separately, as far as I know and is not included in bundles. (I think, I don't take sports)
Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
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.
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I think Amazon would be extremely aggressive on price and have sports at a price point well below that £25, at least to begin with. They could just market it as "add footie for a tenner" or something like that onto existing Prime subs.
Amazon don't need a channel, they have their streaming service and could bundle other sports into the package.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
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.
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I don't know how many Now Tv sports subscribers there are, but I doubt its many as the cost is higher than Sky's normal satellite service, for sports anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
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.
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On those last points, the PL could go direct now and cut out the middleman, this is happening in America and this has only been possible over recent years with the increase of broadband speeds.
Interesting that you mention ITV Digital. They don't exist because Murdoch killed them. His Israeli company broke ITV Digital's encryption and then leaked it all on the internet, thus destroying the business.
Leaving aside football for a second, but the general argument that I am making about the streamers and especially the tech giants, is they are the Murdoch of today. They're the sharks and they're the ones with the deeper pockets, which is exactly why Murdoch sold out.
Who's bigger out of these two groups:
Comcast
AT&T
Verizon
Disney
Apple
Amazon
Google
Facebook
One group is significantly larger than the other and its why if Amazon (or any other tech co) wants to compete against Sky on sports or anything else, they can and potentially destroy their business.