Amazon Prime: where sport and shopping collide
If you want to understand Amazon’s approach to sport, it’s best to take a step back and remember what Amazon really is: a massive shop. The guiding aim is to sell goods to customers as often and as seamlessly as possible.
This week the company’s sports strategy was made even clearer when it announced a deal with the NFL to air a game globally as part of a special “Black Friday” schedule. The match between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Chicago Bears will stream on Amazon Prime Video in 240 countries and territories, with no membership required to watch. Later, two NBA games will also be shown worldwide.
Jay Marine, head of Prime Video US and global sports, said in a statement: “We cannot wait to provide fans with best-in-class coverage and a full day of action, holiday deals and surprises.”
The key words here are “holiday deals”. For Amazon, big ticket sport is still largely a mechanism for getting subscribers to log into their Prime accounts and sit there for hours. Once they are in, the company can deploy its arsenal of techniques to turn passive viewers into active shoppers.
That these games are going global is a sign of how successful US retailers have been at exporting the concept of Black Friday, despite the rest of the world having no cultural ties to the post-Thanksgiving tradition. Black Friday deals are now widely available at some of the most un-American retailers — such as John Lewis and Argos in the UK. Ask the average British person where Black Friday comes from, and you’ll likely get a shrug.
So how does that chime with the other Amazon Prime announcement this week — a further expansion of its pay-per-view offering to include a bunch of South American football games. A handful of French football and Nations League matches are already available in certain markets on a pay-per-view basis.
In this instance, Amazon is simply serving as a point of sale, much as it would if it were selling another brand’s underpants or kettles. The sport available on pay-per-view is typically the kind that has little or no value on the open market for media rights — traditional broadcasters aren’t going to pay to stock it. Amazon is offering to step in as a shop window, logistics hub and payment processor. Rights holders with nothing to lose get to see if someone, somewhere is willing to pay something for their goods.
Amazon’s approach of picking up a collection of premium sports assets likely to attract big audiences makes sense. It doesn’t need a huge inventory of stock, just enough to get certain groups of people logging on with predictable frequency. Hence it shows Champions League on Tuesdays, NFL games on Thursdays, and NBA on Fridays.
Meanwhile Netflix explained this week it has a different approach. On an earnings call, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the streamer was not looking at “big season packages” but rather wanted more “big live events”. Presumably he means more deals like the one with the NFL, where Netflix shows two games on Christmas Day.
“We believe these big events that attract mass audiences are kind of differentially valuable for our members”, Sarandos said. “These events typically have outsized positives for conversation and for acquisition, and we strongly suspect retention.”
For rights holders, then, the future looks set to be about chopping things up into bite-sized pieces designed to hit the sweet spot with each of the various streamers looking at sport.