Live Sports — The Next Streaming War

Keith Teare
19 min readJun 30, 2022

By Keith Teare • Issue #316 • View online

An average sports stadium can hold 50–100,000 fans. But teams have millions and sometimes billions of fans. What is the true value of the rights to stream games? This week Amazon bought UK Champions League rights. Can we expect more money to come for sports rights and who should own them?

Contents

Live Sports — The Next Streaming War

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Editorial

Software is about to eat live sports. The signs have been coming for some time. Apple pioneered the trend by buying the rights to Friday night baseball and MLS soccer. It is rumored to be interested in Sunday Ticket for NFL streaming.

Now Amazon is strongly favored to buy the rights to one of the biggest football competitions in the world — the UEFA Champions League — in one of its biggest markets — the UK. This follows the deal announced in March, an 11-year deal, valued at $1bn (£824m) annually, for Amazon to broadcast live NFL football in the US.

Keith Teare

Founder at SignalRank Corporation. Publisher of That Was The Week, Founder at archimedes.studio.