AMZN Amazon.com Inc

By Stu Woo and Joshua Robinson 

LONDON -- Amazon.com Inc. raised its bet on live sports programming, buying the rights to broadcast a package of soccer games from the most popular sports league in the world, the English Premier League.

The broadcasting rights are limited to Britain, where viewers will be able to watch a small selection of 20 games a season on the company's Amazon Prime video service. But the move represents a significant boost to Amazon's so-far modest foray into live sporting events.

The company has disrupted handfuls of industries -- from health care to the grocery business. Now, it could start chipping away at the power of traditional broadcasters that have long dominated sports broadcasting.

Amazon's package of games won't necessarily include any of the league's marquee offerings, and it only covers two rounds of play. One is in the middle of the week and one on the Dec. 26 Boxing Day holiday. The Premier League is the only major league in Europe to schedule games that day.

That measured approach is consistent with Amazon's previous experiments in broadcasting major sports leagues. The company last year broadcast 10 Thursday-night NFL games, typically the league's least-compelling matchups. That was part of a deal valued at around $50 million, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Amazon and the NFL renewed the deal for 2018 and 2019.

The Premier League rights cover three seasons beginning next year. Amazon will stream the games on its Prime video and one-day delivery service, which costs GBP79-a-year and competes with Netflix Inc.

The most popular games, contained in the largest packages of match days, were gobbled up earlier this year by British pay-TV giant Sky PLC and BT Group PLC. Sky, which has aired the Premier League since its inception in 1992, bought rights for 128 games a season for GBP1.2 billion ($1.6 billion.) a year. The Premier League and Amazon declined to comment on the deal's value.

For the Premier League, the deal marks a potential turning point amid fears of market saturation in Britain. Sky and BT Sport will now air 180 of the 380 total matches played in a season. The U.K. still blacks out games that kick off in the traditional slot of 3 p.m. on a Saturday to protect stadium attendances.

The astronomical increase in the rights' value over the past two decades had also raised questions about how much higher it could go. The league's first rights deal, covering 1992 to 1997, was worth GBP191 million. The current three-year rights deal added up to more than GBP5.1 billion.

As it turned out, the 2016-19 agreement may have been the Premier League's high-water mark, at least when it comes to domestic rights. When the offerings for 2019 to 2022 first hit the market last year, they failed to crack the GBP5 billion mark again. Two of the packages went unsold -- one of them was the selection of games snapped up by Amazon this week.

With the protracted sale of these TV rights behind him, Premier League Chief Executive Richard Scudamore subsequently announced late on Thursday that he would step down from his role by the end of 2018, after 20 years in charge. Mr. Scudamore oversaw the Premier League's transformation from a loose collection of local institutions -- ancient soccer clubs scattered across Britain -- into a global sports and entertainment behemoth shown in nearly 200 countries. The Premier League didn't immediately announce a successor.

Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com and Joshua Robinson at joshua.robinson@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 07, 2018 13:51 ET (17:51 GMT)

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