From The Athletic.....relates to the upcoming streaming via Amazon;
By Matt Slater
Amazon is the world’s largest internet company, has annual revenues of close to £200 billion and employs nearly 650,000 people worldwide but on Tuesday evening, they will be “shitting themselves” about 22 blokes in south east London.
That is not Amazon’s official line, of course; it is an off-the-record comment from one of the internet service providers to whom the Seattle-based behemoth is entrusting its reputation when it becomes the first company to legally stream live Premier League football — for free, if you are a canny shopper — in the UK this week.
When Crystal Palace and Bournemouth kick off at 7.30pm on Tuesday, it could be the start of Amazon’s bid to steal Christmas, heralding the next phase in the Premier League’s push to overtake the National Football League as the world’s most profitable sports league. Or it might become competition for New Coke, the Sinclair C5 and smokeless cigarettes in the disastrous product launch stakes.
By half-time at Selhurst Park, a second stream should be flowing from Turf Moor, where Burnley host the buffering champions Manchester City in an unusual 8.15pm kick-off. The number of eyeballs and amount of scrutiny on Amazon Prime Video’s leap into live Premier League football will be doubled, with increasing strain on the network.
The real test, however, will come towards the intervals of Wednesday evening’s first five fixtures, including Jose Mourinho’s return to Old Trafford with Spurs, a 7.30pm start. Merseyside logs on for Liverpool v Everton at 8.15pm.
At this point, anyone unlucky enough to live at the end of a long line of copper wire from the closest telephone exchange might not be enjoying the ability to stream two games on different devices, with a third kept spare for Prime Video’s new Goals Centre show while accessing the latest Opta stats. Instead, might you be waiting 30 seconds to find out what happened to that cross your full-back just made, watching without sound or just screaming at a blank screen on your not-so smart TV?
And the really scary bit about this for Amazon is it will be as helpless as the rest of us if there are any crashes or unplanned repairs on the broadband superhighway.
This is the context of that “shitting themselves” remark, although another industry source described the mood at Amazon UK’s Principal Place HQ in Shoreditch as “nervous, but more like the nerves you would feel before a big exam or cup final”.
The company’s on-the-record response to reports last week about the risk of technical issues spoiling its debut were words to the effect of “it will be alright on the night”, whilst assuring us it has been in talks with the country’s biggest internet service providers about managing traffic and “scaling up” its own operations.
It is understood Amazon was also in talks with Channel 4 about sharing its rights for Liverpool-Everton with the free-to-air channel — to lighten the load on the network, dilute any negative publicity for snafus beyond its control, and ensure a big audience for its core pre-Christmas message of free two-day delivery for gifts bought on its website. But the Premier League pointed out such sub-licensing deals are ruled out in the deal Amazon signed in June 2018.
That was when the company broke the BT Sport and Sky duopoly on domestic Premier League rights by picking up one of the two packages of games that were designed, gift-wrapped and signposted for one or more of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google or Netflix to scrap over.
As it happened, the fight failed to break out in February last year, when the league sold the five most valuable packages to its traditional partners, but Amazon did eventually take the opportunity to plant its flag in another market — and risk falling flat on its face.
The argument for the former is that for a relatively small outlay, Amazon has won the rights to two sets of midweek fixtures, one of them over a bank holiday, for the next three campaigns. The precise figure has never been released but BT paid £90 million for a similar package as, together with Sky, they shelled out £4.55 billion to secure domestic Premier League TV rights until the end of 2022.
This season — and we should expect something similar in years two and three — the 20 games bought by Amazon will be streamed to Prime members over five days, with the first round of games between December 3 and 5, and the second from 12.30pm to nearly 10pm on Boxing Day, with a final flourish of Wolves against Manchester City on December 27.
An Amazon Prime membership costs £7.99 a month or £79 for 12 months, although the company is well aware many fans will already have signed up for the free 30-day trial and circled a date after December 27 on the calendar to cancel that membership.
Or maybe, Amazon is hoping, they will decide they quite liked the shorter gap between click and delivery, the feature-length Grand Tour specials or the second season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, and sign up for longer. Or perhaps they will just forget to cancel. Either way, the world’s biggest online market/cloud computing platform/Artificial Intelligence pioneer has you and 100 million other Amazon Prime customers hooked.
So why is this such a risk for Amazon? You only need to dip your toe into live sports streaming’s recent history.
In September 2017, DAZN, the London-based subscription service, started streaming NFL games in Canada but fumbled as customers complained about pixelated pictures and error messages telling them to try different devices. A year later, Australian telecoms company Optus was forced to share its rights for the World Cup in Russia with a terrestrial broadcaster halfway through the tournament after its streaming service infuriated fans already a little touchy after the Socceroos’ low-bandwidth displays.
Later that summer, Eleven Sports, another new player with big hopes, announced itself to the UK market with exclusive coverage of golf’s USPGA Championship. Unfortunately, some viewers were excluded from watching Brooks Koepka’s winning putt. Within months, the overstretched and chastened company would be handing back their expensively-assembled La Liga and Serie A rights.
Golf would provide another salutatory lesson for sports streamers last November, when Turner Sports’ “B/R Live” service was forced to show The Match between Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods for free and refund those who had already paid. Its boss described as server issues “caused by really insufficient memory…and the high volume of consumer access requests in a condensed amount of time”.
But the best cautionary tale belongs to Amazon Prime Video itself because, sandwiched between those two slices of golfing misfortune was the 2018 US Open from Flushing Meadows, its first big live sports event in the UK. The Athletic has spoken to several tennis journalists and nobody remembers the coverage of that tournament with any fondness. “Disastrous”, “lots of complaints”, “terrible picture quality” and “their lack of tennis knowledge showed” were the more polite comments.
“They have improved with time in terms of the on-screen production and the number of court feeds but I still often experience technical issues, such as streams regularly cutting off during matches,” says one senior reporter. “I would not be at all surprised if a late winner in the Merseyside derby was missed because of a technical problem. Many viewers missed the last few games of this year’s US Open women’s final.”
Another correspondent was more positive, though.
“They had difficulties when they launched with tennis primarily because their second event ever was the US Open,” he explains. “That’s a heck of a baptism of fire — all eyes on them — with no real chance to test everything or understand exactly what tennis viewers expect. They were doing it in the full glare and there were a lot of negative reviews.
“But they’ve done loads of tournaments this year and ironed out a lot of it. By the US Open this time (in 2019), it was much better. There still were some issues but I would say the good news is they have come across a lot of them now before they go live with Premier League.”
And that is the message from Amazon, too. Lessons learned, servers primed.
The company also points out it is has successfully live-streamed NFL games on Thursday nights since 2017 and rolled out eagerly-anticipated shows like the BBC’s Top Gear spin-off Grand Tour.
It could, however, equally be pointed out that the former are simulcast by Fox Sports, which reduces Prime Video’s average audience to about 500,000 viewers, and the latter are not live, so the streaming is staggered.
But there is still the nagging feeling that Amazon Prime has never opened itself up to such a potential social-media mauling than it can expect over the next three and a bit weeks, particularly as the service will then have to wait 11 months to try to repair any possible damage to its reputation.
What cannot be disputed, though, is how seriously Amazon is taking its Premier League debut.
“Fair play, they are doing the job properly with dedicated teams, outside broadcasts at each game and really good people behind and in front of the camera,” says Jim Rosenthal.
The veteran broadcaster is one of 73 commentators, presenters and pundits Amazon has pulled together for its 20 games this month. Rosenthal, who has eight World Cups and more than 150 Formula One races on his CV, will be leading the coverage at the Manchester United v Spurs game on December 4 and Spurs v Brighton on Boxing Day.
This will give the 72-year-old, whose most recent football work has been for MUTV, a chance to resume acquaintances with Jose Mourinho. Joining Rosenthal in the studio at Old Trafford will be Dimitar Berbatov, Harry Redknapp and Peter Schmeichel.
“My technical expertise extends about as far as turning on the telly but everyone is aware of the importance of getting this to work,” says Rosenthal, adding that it took him “about a nanosecond to say yes” when Amazon came calling.
Former England striker Eni Aluko is another who did not need to be asked twice. She will be a pundit for Chelsea v Aston Villa on December 4 and Bournemouth v Arsenal on December 26.
“Amazon isn’t seen as a sports broadcaster but it is a cutting-edge business, and that was part of the reason I was so excited about this opportunity,” says Aluko.
The 32-year-old, who has just completed a successful stint with Juventus, was speaking to The Athletic after shooting a Prime Video promo with fellow pundits Karen Carney, Jermaine Jenas and Clinton Morrison.
“We were told to talk about the games just like we were in the green room,” she says. “I think they want a more informal approach from the pundits but they still want us to deliver our opinions.”
Others among the 73 new additions to Amazon president Jeff Bezos’s payroll include Peter Crouch, Thierry Henry, Michael Owen and Alan Shearer, although those last two are unlikely to be on the same sofa after their literary dispute. Commentary duties will be provided by the likes of Jon Champion, Connor McNamara and Guy Mowbray. In other words, lots of people you have heard and watched talking about football before.
There will be some very safe hands behind the cameras and in the edit suites and satellite trucks, too, as Amazon has hired award-winning production company Sunset + Vine to run the outside broadcasts. Goals Centre will be broadcast from BT Sport’s studio in east London. So far, so familiar.
That tie-up with BT is significant for several reasons, as not only did they share the two quirky packages of games left unsold in the first round of last year’s rights auction, but they have also done a deal to allow pubs to show Amazon’s games on the BT Sport channel. There is also a considerable overlap of presenters and pundits. As the second and third players in this market, it makes sense for them to club together against the might of Sky Sports.
“Whenever someone says, ‘We’re going to do things differently’, a shiver goes down my spine,” says Rosenthal. “Maybe, in the future, we can talk about mic-ing up the ref or putting cameras on goalkeepers’ heads but for now, we just want to put in a professional performance.”
There will, however, be some new bells and whistles, with viewers able to access Opta possession statistics, team formations and player bios via Amazon’s “X-Ray function”, which opens a smaller box of data on your screen to the right or underneath the live action, depending on your device.
Highlight clips will also be updated throughout the game, so fans can rewatch key moments, and Amazon is promising a two-to-three-minute highlights package shortly after the final whistle. There will also be a 30-minute package soon after and a complete re-run of the game at midnight, which will available for a week.
When you add all this up and factor in the fact Amazon is covering nine games on Boxing Day alone, starting with Spurs v Brighton at 12.30pm and finishing with what could be a very significant Leicester v Liverpool clash at the very unfriendly time of 8pm for travelling supporters, it is easy to see how there will be 2,000 people toiling on the firm’s football foray this Christmas.
“Our hope is that people will wake up on Boxing Day, make some turkey sandwiches, flop on the sofa and probably not move for 12 hours while we entertain them,” says Rosenthal. He might be right.
In fact, once you add in the tennis and NFL coverage, some original drama, a few films, the free two-day delivery and special offers, throw in its back catalogue of All or Nothing sports documentaries and remember that the next one off the production line stars Mauricio Pochettino, Mourinho and the resurgent Spurs, and you can definitely see the logic of this move.
But if Amazon thinks it has received some unfair criticism over the years for how it treats warehouse staff, its tax bill or impact on the high street, it has a rude awakening coming its way if one half of Merseyside misses a later winner on Wednesday. Empires have fallen for less than that.