Amazon, Facebook, Twitter & Co To Bid For Premier League Live Rights?

The executive chairman of the English Premier League, Richard Scudamore, has indicated that online giants could show live matches across the UK for the first time and end the reign of BT and Sky. He was speaking days after it emerged that Amazon had bid about £50 million to show ATP World Tour tennis over five years.

It is expected that the Premier League will put its next cycle of domestic rights, starting from 2019, out to tender this year.

Premier League Matches to Air On Amazon & Facebook?

Premier League would not be the first big league to be able to watch on Facebook as a number of matches from Spain's top division were already broadcasted live and for free. However, there is nothing like a big money deal between Facebook and La Liga yet as it is intended by the Premier League.

via The Times

"We envisage anybody, really, being able to come along and bid for those rights," he told The Times. "We would need some distribution criteria and to make sure it was readily available across platforms and everything else, but as long as it was widely available and distributed properly, we wouldn't rule those out."

via Deloitte

Mr Scudamore conceded it was improbable that the league would "achieve the same compound growth" as between 1992 and 2015, when domestic live rights revenues rose from £38.2 million per year to £1.71 billion. "I think we'd be bigger than gross domestic product, probably, by the time we got there," he said.

"It's true that these guys are cash rich," said Mike Darcey, Sky's former chief operating officer and a former chief executive of News International. "But it's a big step up from the ATP to the Premier League. You can't extrapolate one to the other."

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