[jfman]

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Well, I have explained various ways of reducing cost to consumers, so this would be a second, not a first explanation. I am not trawling through a huge wad of posts to play this game - you can do that if you have enough hours in the day.

I have explained previously that Sky's approach is to charge the maximum possible price and keep all the rights to itself. The example I gave before set out how Amazon, with its retail arm, could sell other products on the back of sports rights. It would gain additional Prime customers, encouraging them to shop on Amazon's site, and it could market football paraphernalia on the actual football channel site. It could grant non-exclusive rights of some matches to the terrestrial channels to generate further income, as well as allowing highlights to be shown on other channels after the event.

None of these look like particularly efficient mechanisms of recouping £4.5bn and making profit over and above that. I assume their calculators weren't working before they decided to not make a substantive bid for the rights in 2018.

Sky's approach is not the only one. Instead of charging sky high prices for these matches, they could reduce the price and make it accessible to more people. They could also offer a range of packages which might attract more uptake.

Amazon might even offer football as a loss leader to promote other parts of its business, as it did for the rights already acquired to screen the Premier league matches. Amazon gave us those matches at no extra charge, something that I dare say Sky would never have contemplated.

Easy to give something away when you got the rights for peanuts.

I think the mistake people are making is to imagine that Amazon would operate in the same way as Sky does, fleecing customers for all its worth. I don't think it needs to be like that and I believe that Amazon would have a different approach.

Of course, it would be different for other streamers such as DAZN, who do not have a retail arm, but for them it would be more of a straight forward question of whether it would be worth it for them, drawing on their experience of acquiring rights for sport elsewhere. There would still be the other areas of flexibility on price and awarding non-exclusive rights, etc, though. I'm not sure whether DAZN's pockets are deep enough to take on Sky and BT, but Amazon has no such problems.

The mistake is believing that Amazon are some kind of benign philanthropic organisation out there to give away free football, or that even if they were the UK would be their main target market and not the US, Germany or other major markets. Anyone spending £4.5bn on football rights is going to recoup the majority of that £4.5bn through selling a premium sports subscription.

Amazon already have 6.7m Prime subscribers - the low hanging fruit - and this number would need to be substantially driven up as a 'loss leader' to recoup the cost of the rights.