For years, cable TV has bled viewers and subscribers to streaming giants like Netflix, Apple and Amazon. Now, those same companies are vying to stream live sports, one of the last lines of defence when it comes to audiences paying big bucks for traditional cable packages.
AppleTV+ has a 10 year, multibillion-dollar deal to stream MLS soccer matches and also streams some MLB games. Netflix has paid to secure the rights to WWE wrestling.
But Amazon was among the first streamers to aggressively bid on broadcast rights for a range of sports, and just this week, it added Monday night NHL games to its offerings.
“We’re committed to driving more innovation for fans as we bring the NHL into more Canadian homes and across more devices on Monday nights than ever before,” said Magda Grace, head of Prime Video, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in a news release.
The leagues won’t survive if paywalls go up. Watching your team “for free” via OTA broadcast TV is how they got so big in the first place. CBC’s HNIC was huge. More and more, if there are barriers to watching something, many people prior just won’t bother.
MLB on Apple TV
If I cared enough to go out of my way to watch something then why wouldn’t I pirate it?
The leagues won’t survive if paywalls go up. Watching your team “for free” via OTA broadcast TV is how they got so big in the first place.
These franchises have local monopolies. There’s no substitute, no competition, so there’s little risk of “not surviving”. Countries that are serious about soccer (EU/LatAm) will have several teams per city and each team will take part in a dozen independent leagues, but if you move to Canada each city has this one Hockey/Soccer team that matters, and the one league that matter is the NHL/MLS.
You assume, incorrectly, that people will always care about said professional teams/sports.
A lot of the “care” is in the communal activity of watching a game together with one’s mates. Take the convenience of that away, and people will find something else to do.
Yeah, we are definitely starting from different assumptions. I don’t see people pivoting their life-long passions often enough I guess.
There’s precedent: MLB Lockout. No ball games on TV, people found other things to do.
It took years to recover.
amazon also purchased a huge stake in NBA (men’s basketball) TV rights for the next decade last week. Becoming players in the pro sports market seems like a key step in streaming services becoming the new cable (eg, you pay and there are ads)
Yes. That’s in the article as well.
How is this breaching the last line of defence if the first thing to note is that AppleTV and Netflix had already done so
Rogers would sell their own mothers to get rid of those broadcasting rights all together. It has not been the boon they thought it was going to be. American side, they’ve been dealing with huge downturns in numbers too (one of their regional broadcast partners even went broke, and most fingers are pointing at the cost of these rights).
So it’s onto the streamers. Who’ll inevitably start putting paywalls on top of it, which will likely drive away quite a lot of fans. I’m already getting sick of being nickel and dimed by these streaming companies, who multiply by the day and their greed has led them to overtake the evil they were supposed to be replacing (cable). It’ll be the start of the NHL downfall in fact, and likely Bettman’s swan song. That’s my prediction.
Do the MLB next! Do it! Do it, do it, do it!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But Amazon was among the first streamers to aggressively bid on broadcast rights for a range of sports, and just this week, it added Monday night NHL games to its offerings.
“We’re committed to driving more innovation for fans as we bring the NHL into more Canadian homes and across more devices on Monday nights than ever before,” said Magda Grace, head of Prime Video, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in a news release.
“[Sports] used to be the one of the only things keeping people tied to cable,” said David Hardisty, an associate professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.
He says the streaming industry is headed for a consolidation of sorts, where viewers can group a handful of subscriptions on a package deal that will come to resemble the traditional cable bundle that drove so many away in the first place.
“The great re-bundling already underway is making it increasingly difficult and expensive for sports viewers to watch their favourite teams,” Payson-Denney told CBC News.
And that means fans who don’t want to miss a game will likely have to navigate several different streaming services plus continue to pay for cable packages that still have key sports rights.
The original article contains 748 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
