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Amazon Prime Video’s managing director of sport in Europe, Alex Green, has said he “would love” to offer more women’s sports on the streaming platform in the future.
The tech and ecommerce giant’s Prime Video service has offered tennis Grand Slam and WTA Tour action in recent years in the UK, though the latter is heading to pay-TV broadcaster Sky Sports, which also retook the rights to the US Open from this year.
Prime Video has rebounded in the US by agreeing a deal to show 27 National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) games per season as part of a four-year pact. The over-the-top (OTT) platform also has global streaming rights to select games from the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).
Speaking at SportsPro Madrid, Green revealed that Amazon has ambitions to beef out its women’s sport slate as it plots its next rights moves.
“We’ve offered women’s tennis for five years alongside men’s tennis in the UK,” he said. “Sadly, that is coming to an end.
“I would love to offer more women’s sports in the strategy. In terms of our own investments, we don’t have many sports investments. We’re not, if you like, a traditional linear broadcaster or even a big bundle provider of sports from ourselves.
“We love offering sports through third parties on our service. But we have a very, very limited number of sports we ourselves have invested in, but I’m sure you’ll see more women’s sports along the way.”
Green also said third-party content and acting as an aggregator was “really important” for Amazon, including working with other broadcasters and rights holders. He expects to double down on this approach in the coming years, adding that users like the convenience of using Prime Video as a content aggregator.
“We can’t, sadly, afford to offer these huge bundles of sports within Prime [Video],” continued Green. “But we want to offer almost infinite extensibility by offering these additional channels. Those could be either other aggregators, like a TNT or a DAZN, or indeed the actual federations themselves. In the US, we offer the out of market games for [the] NBA, for example, or the NFL. So those are really important parts of our offering. I’m sure that will only increase.
“[The channels] business [is] fundamental to the way Prime Video works and being a very simple, a very natural aggregator of content. Not just sport, but all forms of entertainment content.
“That’s something that I think people really value actually because it’s a simple login, there’s only one credit card with a trusted provider you need to provide. So it’s a very easy way to get access to all these other channels.”
When asked to comment on rumours earlier this year that Amazon was considering launching a dedicated app for live sports streaming, Green appeared to pour cold water on the prospect. Instead, he said improving the Prime Video experience was the priority.
“We tweak that all the time,” he said. “When you think about the different events we have ranging from US Open tennis, where we had to create this whole sort of mini page for a Grand Slam tournament, versus [the] Champions League where it’s very much around one core match.
“We have to vary that experience, but within Prime Video, and that continues to improve and that’s the core of our focus.”
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