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Originally Posted by Horizon
It's a test for Amazon, of course I can accept that.
On funding, the metrics of it, we spoke about this before, but think about what Amazon is first and foremost, a retailer. At the most basic level they can flog football shirts, at a more complex level they could use their vast data, to flog far more products and services to football fans and sell that data to third parties, so I wouldn't assume that there would be a £30-40 football sub, it maybe less, more, or none at all.
Where are the customers going to come from, you ask? Simple. If they win the best packages from Sky, it will be Sky customers. Do you think people who are massive football fans would not switch from Sky to Amazon, becuase I think they would. Which leads me to another point and why Amazon or someone else might do this, it knocks the competition out, in fact, it would kill them.
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It’s not simple to say these customers are like for like and would move across quickly. The proof: the absence of a bid at all. Sky paying less than they did last time out.
No football subscription at all is absolute fanstasyland. Grab your nearest pocket calculator and divide 5 000 000 000 by anything you like to grasp the challenge.
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Sky's business model is based on football and from that, all the other stuff like films, Sky Q etc. But it's football first and without it, Sky's whole business would have to change.
As more than half of the country already has a Amazon account, it would not be hard for Amazon to up sell football to those customers wanting it. Or Facebook, or Apple etc.
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Back of a fag packet calculations (I’ve not even seen those) and sticking £5bn up for a return are wildly different things.
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Finally and I've said before, Amazon are global in nature, so one day it might be PL rights for the UK, next day they might try and get things changed so that they can bid for global rights. There's a lot of Chinese PL fans out there.
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Substitute every reference to £5bn above for £10bn. You’re also assuming Amazon would be more efficient as distributing EPL into these territories than the incumbents. You don’t have to look far, Eleven Sports, to see how the popularity of La Liga in this country varied a lot when you asked folk to put their hand in their pocket for that alone.
I do agree that Sky’s business model is precarious without Premiership football - that’s why I consider them a good barometer of the falling value of the rights in the absence of a competing model.