Amazon buys rights to exclusively livestream 20 Premier League football matches per season for three seasons starting from 2019
US online retailer will exclusively livestream 20 matches per season from 2019 — Amazon has broken Sky and BT's stranglehold on Premier League football …
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's move is the payoff to a two-year push into live sport: sources reported as early as September 2016 that it was chasing streaming rights to properties like the French Open and professional rugby for Prime Video. Landing 20 exclusive Premier League matches per season from 2019 breaks the Sky–BT duopoly that had defined UK top-flight broadcasting.
The deal also set the template others followed: Amazon later put four Premier League games free on Twitch in 2020, Apple weighed following it into English soccer rights in 2023, and by December 2023 Amazon had failed to renew, with Sky and TNT taking the next cycle in a £6.7B package.
First-order effects
- Sky and BT lose their stranglehold on Premier League coverage from 2019, facing an exclusive competitor for the first time in the league's pay-TV era.
- Prime Video gains its first marquee live-sport property, giving Amazon a fresh retention hook bundled into Prime membership.
Second-order effects
- Other US tech platforms are drawn in behind Amazon — Apple's reported interest in Premier League and other English soccer rights shows the entry repriced the asset class for every bidder.
- Rights inflation accelerates: with tech money competing against incumbents, the next UK cycle clears at £6.7B across Sky and TNT, a structure shaped by the competition Amazon introduced.
Third-order effects
- Live sport becomes a cyclical acquisition tool rather than a permanent broadcast holding: Amazon entered to break the bundle and exited when the renewal price outran the subscription value, leaving incumbents to reabsorb the rights.
- If the pattern holds, leagues face a two-tier market — deep-pocketed tech bidders inflating cycles they may not stay for, and traditional broadcasters paying the clearing price — pushing governing bodies toward shorter deals and more flexible packaging.
The trend: Tech platforms treat live sports rights as finite subscriber-acquisition plays — entering to break pay-TV bundles, then ceding them back when renewal economics stop clearing.