Manchester City's head coach Pep Guardiola has a moment of quiet reflection during his team's Dec 3 clash with Tottenham Hotspur at Etihad Stadium. Photo / AP
Manchester City's head coach Pep Guardiola has a moment of quiet reflection during his team's Dec 3 clash with Tottenham Hotspur at Etihad Stadium. Photo / AP
OPINION
It seems counterintuitive, but there are two reasons why Sky TV New Zealand could love the latest English Premier League domestic rights deal, despite it being billed as the richest sports media package in UK history.
The English Premier League (EPL) has just announced a record £6.7 billion (NZ$13.7b)deal for domestic rights, covering three seasons from 2025.
The English Premier League has been a global bellwether, setting sports rights trends from pricing to the involvement of telcos and Big Tech - and now their withdrawal. Photo / AP
1, Lower cost per game, lower in real terms
The first is that it’s only a “record” amount if you squint your eyes and look at the spreadsheet funny.
£6.7b is pitched as a 4 per cent increase for live rights over the previous deal on a per-game basis; it covers more games.
But that doesn’t keep up with inflation over the past three football seasons, or the past three years, as regular civilians would say. According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, goods that cost £1 in 2020 would cost you £1.21 today.
So the cost of football rights seems to have reached a high watermark, then receded.
2. Amazon missing
The second is the conspicuous absence of Amazon’s Prime Video.
Prime held rights to 20 matches - clustered marquee holiday-season fixtures - under the previous deal, which still has a season to run.
But the streaming giant reportedly didn’t even bid for one of the three packages of games up for auction.
In any event, matches under the new deal will be broadcast and streamed by three traditional players: Sky UK, the BBC and the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned TNT Sports.
British Telecom, which last decade blazed a trail in sports rights, in a move aped by Spark, sold its rights for the current cycle to TNT; BT holds a stake in TNT, but it’s been described as a managed exit.
Rumoured bids by Apple (which last year bagged US Major League Soccer global rights in a 10-year, US$2.5b deal) came to naught.
Given that the English Premier League has been such a bellwether for broadcast and streaming trends, Sky has to be quietly pleased the EPL’s latest deal doesn’t feature any of the Big Tech players who, along with BT, have done so much to inflate bidding for rights.
Amazon is still in sports, including European football, but its absence from the new EPL underlines that it’s become a here-and-there approach, a contrast to the all-hands, steamroller approach it’s taken with e-tail, cloud computing and even entertainment streaming.
Why have Amazon’s sports ambitions - once so feared - turned out to be so relatively modest?
My two cents: Even if it executed in sports streaming perfectly, it won’t really move the need for the tech giant (market cap US$1.52 trillion, trailing 12-month revenue US$554b); certainly not enough to compensate for the regulatory and political peril that comes with putting A-list sports behind a paywall.
The flip side is that NZ Rugby is now short of a competitive bidder. Some saw Amazon filling the void left by Spark Sport.
Still, with its new, inhouse NZR+ streaming service, currently showing the likes of docos, library footage and interviews, NZ Rugby has created a potential DIY streaming service for live games - which will at the very least be a bargaining chip when Sky’s current rugby deal expires at the end of 2025.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
