Here is the Amazon tiki-taka for winning Serie A football

19 January 20213 years ago babelfish

All of Amazon's moves on Serie A football matches. The article by Francesco Lommi

Jeff Bezos takes the field more and more. After the acquisition of the audiovisual rights of the 16 best Wednesday Champions League matches for Italy , it seems that Amazon wants to ruin the plans of Sky and Dazn also regarding the national rights of the Serie A championship.

Ten days after the closing of the call, Bloomberg , a New York media company, has spread an indiscretion that could upset the balance: Amazon is also in the race for Italian TV rights in Serie A.

The news, however, was not entirely unexpected for other broadcasters. Amazon's entry into this market has long been in the air. In fact, just a few weeks ago, the Seattle giant announced with a short press release on its website that from next season, for all Prime customers in Italy, it will be possible to watch the spectacle of the best Wednesday night UEFA Champions League matches.

For two years now, Bezos' group has focused decisively on the world of football. In fact, after the fruitful experiments in America with the NFL, Amazon has launched into European football starting from what is considered by many to be the most spectacular and competitive championship: the English Premier League.

If, as it seems, Amazon becomes an active player on the sports broadcaster scene in the coming years, December 3, 2019 could soon become a historic date. That Monday evening , for the first time, on the Amazon Prime platform it was possible to see an English football match, more precisely Crystal Palace-Bournemouth. The match, a 1-0 without too many emotions between two medium-low ranking teams, was presented and told by 52 people including journalists, opinion leaders and technicians, creating a truly complete experience for all Prime users.

After just three weeks, the Premier is back on Prime screens with the complete Boxing Day schedule (December 26), peaking on January 5, 2020 with the FA Cup derby (the English national cup) between Liverpool and Everton. , followed by nearly 2 million viewers.

Amazon's ability to present and manage a complicated product such as the live streaming – thanks to AWS technology, the same technology used by Netflix – of a football match had immediate feedback in terms of new subscribers. In fact, in the reports at the end of January 2020, the e-commerce giant recorded a 35% increase in Prime customers in the fourth quarter of 2019 and the achievement, over the year, of 7.14 million users overall: best result ever for Amazon.

Impossible to think that the entry of football into the already rich Amazon schedule did not have a decisive weight in this success.

We will have to wait until January 26 for official and definitive news – or perhaps a little more in case of a private negotiation between Lega and operators – but we can already speculate as to which package Bezos will enter the race. The announcement published by the League for domestic audiovisual rights of Serie A provides for a minimum purchase of 114 matches for satellite, digital terrestrial or internet.

The idea of the Lega and the consortium of funds (Advent, Cvc and Fsi) that is preparing to join the media company created by the same League itself, is to diversify the broadcasters to maximize the earnings from the voice of national TV rights, today more than never critical to the sustainability and survival of clubs. In this context, the participants in the auction could increase given the multiplicity of transmission channels available. In fact, there is talk of possible interest from Disney + and Eurosport, while Netflix seems to have taken a step back. The surprise, however, could come from Mediaset, which intends to break through on the brink and that perhaps it could focus on an unofficial alliance with Sky to try to put Amazon offside for matches to be streamed.

However, Amazon, with a slice of the UEFA Champions League in its pocket and the experience gained with the NFL Premier League, seems to have gained – after three years of preparation – an advantage over these competitors. Based on what has been Bezos' strategy in the past, it seems plausible to assume that initially Amazon can enter in a targeted manner, buying only the rights of some games to be broadcast in streaming to see the response in terms of new Prime subscribers.

If the numbers confirm what has already happened in the Premier, the possibility that Amazon, in the not so distant future, will undermine the "traditional" broadcasters is absolutely not to be excluded.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/ecco-il-tiki-taka-di-amazon-per-la-conquista-della-serie-a-di-calcio/ on Tue, 19 Jan 2021 07:00:44 +0000.