Tampa Bay Buccaneers Tight End Rob Gronkowski (87) celebrates after scoring a first-quarter touchdown during the Super Bowl LV between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on February 7, 2021, at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, FL.
Cliff Welch | Icon Sportswire | Getty Images
Amazon sets its sights on being more than a website for storing phone chargers and paper towels and airing the latest episode of “Wonderful Mrs. Maisel.”
Amazon is in talks with the National Football League to play Thursday night games exclusively starting in 2023, CNBC reported on Thursday. As part of the agreement, Amazon will be responsible for production costs, and the games will continue to be broadcast on local television in the domestic markets of each team that plays.
Winning exclusive streaming rights would mark Amazon’s most aggressive push to date in sports content. It also has the potential to pump even more value into the Amazon Prime Video platform, while serving as an added benefit to its Prime subscription program, which now has over 150 million paid members worldwide.
For Amazon, its video streaming service has always served a greater purpose than just being a tool to compete against streaming rivals like Netflix and Hulu.
Prime Video is part of Amazon’s much-loved “flyer”, which offers compelling deals for consumers. The idea is that Prime Video will attract more people to become part of its Prime subscription service, which costs $ 119 per year, leading to more engagement and more on-site purchases.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos briefly explained why Prime Video is a good business model for the company in a 2016 interview with Recode: “From a business POV to us, we end up monetizing that content in a unusually. When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes. “
Sports content and NFL games in particular enhance this value proposition for existing and future Prime subscribers. Sports content could also attract the rapid share of cable cuts away from other services.
The company already has a service called Amazon Channels, which allows customers to choose and choose the channels they want to subscribe to, such as Starz and HBO, without having to sign up for a software package or enter into a contract.
Making a deal with the NFL could make the Amazon Channels service even more sticky, helping it stand out from similar non-sports offerings.
In the long run, if Amazon manages to wear NFL games exclusively, which would mean taking them off traditional television, it could serve as a winning pitch for advertisers. Amazon holds large amounts of consumer data, from user interactions with devices related to its vast Alexa ecosystem to millions of purchases on its e-commerce site.
Amazon not only has visibility into what buyers are looking for and buying, but also on the ads they click on and whether or not they bought an item after seeing an ad. So it can assure brands that their ads are in front of the right people.
Advertising has quickly become a key profit engine for Amazon’s global business. Amazon is expected to be the largest shareholder among the dominant digital advertising companies in 2021 and 2022, with advertising revenue rising to $ 85.2 billion by 2026, from $ 26.1 billion projected in 2021, according to a Cowen poll published in January.