Amazon Prime Video is betting big on sports streaming

Alexandra Gilbert, Amazon Australia’s head of content, confessed she wasn’t a massive fan of cricket until she watched the streamer’s docuseries, The Test.

It was the stories behind the Australian cricket team, how they tried to redeem themselves after Sandpaper-gate, but it was something more personal that drew her in.

“Season one enabled me to really bond with my dad when I suddenly knew the names of all the players and the coach, and he was very, very proud to say the least,” Gilbert said.

“When I think about all that context that I’ve been able to get from The Test, I’m so much more interested in how (the team plays at the ICC World Test Championship Finals) and that’s what great storytelling does.

“It builds emotional investment from your audience and what’s cool is sometimes that starts and ends with the show you’re watching, but for us now, we’ve laid that foundation for a lot of potentially casual or never fans with The Test, and we’re able to offer them live play alongside that.”

Last week, Gilbert, the converted fan, was able to stand on the field of the home of cricket, Lord’s in London, just before the ICC WTC finals got under way in which Australia, led by captain Pat Cummins, lost to South Africa in an upset.

The tournament, which wrapped up after four days, was streamed exclusively on Prime Video, reflecting the changing order in the world of sports broadcasting.

For any mass-appeal streamer, live sports is now a crucial piece of the wider puzzle, and will be increasingly one of the key pillars of what they offer. With the streaming subscriber market reaching saturation after a decade of scripted and reality TV programs, sports is the new dangling carrot.

In Australia, Prime is two years into a four-year deal with the ICC, which gives it the rights to World Cups, T20 games, the Champions Trophy and the WTC finals. There’s a global agreement for a portion of NBA games, and it has a deal with the NBA to offer its league pass.

Over on Disney, its gargantuan sports brand ESPN was folded into its streaming platform, with Australia and New Zealand the first English-language territories outside the US to do so, giving subscribers access to a slate of American sports including NBA, MLB, NHL and more.

Paramount+ has the rights to the A-League and AFC Champions, Stan has rugby union, tennis, Indycar and UEFA, Apple has Major League Baseball’s Friday night games, Netflix has WWE and boxing, and Optus Sports has a range of football including the English Premier League and the FA Cup.

Long gone are the days when sports rights were split between free-to-air broadcasters and Foxtel. If you’re a sports nut, multiple subscriptions don’t come cheap, although Australia’s anti-siphoning scheme does protect certain sports or games as nationally and culturally significant, giving FTAs first right-of-refusal in negotiations.

Much like streaming in general, there’s a significant fracturing across platforms, a common pain point cited by consumers. According to Telsyte figures, the average Australian household subscribes to 3.4 services.

Alex Green, managing director, international of Prime Video Sports, said potential audience frustration is something he was wary of when Prime first ventured into in the EPL in the UK in 2019.

“We were prepared for this challenge from the beginning when we did that Premier League deal,” he told The Nightly. “Suddenly, we were the third provider alongside Sky and I think it was BT Sports at the time.

“We were a bit concerned that would be the reaction – ‘Oh, I have to get another subscription’. In reality, that didn’t materialise because Prime is so different and Prime continues to grow.

“People definitely don’t just subscribe to us and don’t stay with us just for the sport. The sport often can be a bit of a hook into Prime, but there such a range of benefits there. That’s the real reason that people stay with Prime. Then we bring in new sports to them, it’s like a gift, really.”

That first EPL package, Green revealed, drove the two biggest single days of Prime acquisition in the UK.

Cummins was confident that fans will follow the sport from platform to platform, “I think most people that love a sport, there’s some people that will watch every single game no matter where it is and they’ll find out, get up at all hours”.

Prime is not a pure-play entertainment business like, say, Netflix or Stan. It’s more frequently lumped with Apple as tech companies whose streaming units are sideshows to the main game, but even Apple is different in that its content services are separately billed or bundled at a higher-priced package.

Sports rights are expensive and becoming even more so in many markets, including in Australia, so there has to be real intention behind any strategy.

“Top tier sports always retain that premier valuation, and that’s because it’s just been proven everywhere that they do drive behaviour in a way that other sports, while they can drive interest and passion and more of the niche audience, the top two sports fundamentally can move the dial for businesses,” Green said.

“Whether it’s ours or a more traditional pay TV company.”

He added that Australia is an interesting market because it’s “absolutely sports crazy” with multiple codes, including at least three big ones.

The platform’s strategy is, at least for now, to focus on local targets rather than global rights, such as Netflix’s 10-year, $US5 billion deal with WWE. For Prime, that’s the NHL in Canada, baseball in Japan, football in Brazil, the Roland Garros tournament in France, and, of course, cricket in Australia.

“What we like to offer are sports that really transcend the day-to-day,” Green said. “We are not a 24/7 sports subscription service where we have to offer round-the-clock sport. We like these appointment-to-view moments.

“Really making it work as much as possible for that local audience.”

He added that, typically, the biggest global sports still prefer to sell their rights by individual markets because they want that local competition to drive up the prices.

When it came to the ICC deal, The Test planted a seed, but it wasn’t a necessary precursor to the company’s pursuit of live cricket.

“We would look at the sporting landscape when we’re thinking about live rights, and it’s fairly apparent what the top sports are in Australia,” Gilbert said. “So, cricket would’ve come across our radar, but definitely having direct experience of the scale and passion of the cricket audience through The Test was confidence-building.”

There have been fervent rumours that Netflix has been chasing the American rights to Formula One after the success of the F1 docuseries Drive to Survive, which has bolstered fandoms around the world, but especially in America, where the sport was never that big.

So, while sports docos and live sports aren’t hard linked, it is a nice-to-have, especially given the unpredictable nature of rights bidding. It also provides opportunities for cross-promotion, such as when Cummins stopped in on Clarkson’s Farm, which also streams on Prime.

“It’s making the soil fertile for this audience to engage with the sport, you hear that a lot,” Gilbert said. “It’s like you tell this story and the hardcore fans come, of course, but they bring their friends and then others hear about it, and then you layer on the sport, and people are really into it.”

Green added, “It keeps fans engaged for longer.”

The journalist travelled to London as a guest of Amazon