If you like watching Tennis then you’ll probably want to grab an Amazon Prime subscription come next year. Amazon have outbid Sky for the ATP World Tour which means outside of the four Grand Slams (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open) just about every men’s tennis match will be live streamed exclusively on Amazon Video.
This is Amazon’s first major sports deal outside of the US and shows just how serious they are about gathering quality content for their subscribers as well as content as well such as The Grand Tour which is due to start it’s second season in the Autumn.
The Guardian reports that Amazon bid as much as £2m more than the £8m a year deal that secured the tennis for Sky in a five year contract that comes to an end next year.
If you’re wondering why Amazon are prepared to dig so deep into their (admittedly bottomless) pocket of cash it’s because tennis fans are now another tranche of customers who will have to cough up their £79/year if they want to continue to follow men’s tennis. Once you’ve subscribed to Amazon for video it would be almost unthinkable that you wouldn’t also make use of your Prime subscription for unlimited free (mainly next day) deliveries of just about anything that can be purchased on Amazon or their thousands of sellers who use FBA.
Expect Amazon to continue to add value to Prime in any and every way that they can. The cheaper a Prime subscription appears based on the mass of additional bonuses you get over and above the shipping incentive the more people will sign up and be happy to renew their subscription. The more people subscribe to Prime the more of their spend they’ll divert to Amazon and so the behemoth carries on growing… which is great news for third party retailers until the day comes that they source your products direct or do a deal with the brands you stock.
Amazon aren’t out simply to win share of consumers spend, they’re out to dominate the world and whilst it’s good to see competitors such as Walmart in the US doing everything they can to compete, the reality is that Amazon are so big and growing so fast that it will take a competitor the size of Alibaba in China or Flipkart in India to attack retail in the West and make a dent in Amazon’s sales. The one and only viable competitor currently in the UK, EU and US is eBay and whilst their last set of results were mixed, signs are good that eBay are continuing their turnaround under Devin Wenig’s stewardship and will accelerate over the next few years.
One Response
Great Amazon want to own Andy Murray now, will there be anything not touched by them soon.