Tampa Bay Buccaneers Tight End Rob Gronkowski (87) celebrates after scoring a first quarter touchdown during Super Bowl LV between the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers on February 7, 2021 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, FL.
Cliff Welch | Sportswire icon | Getty Images
Amazon wants to be more than just a website to stock up on phone chargers and paper towels and stream the latest episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”
Amazon is in talks with the National Football League to launch Thursday night games exclusively in 2023, CNBC reported Thursday. As part of the agreement, Amazon would be responsible for production costs and the games would still be broadcast on local TV in the home markets of each of the playing teams.
Winning the exclusive streaming rights would mark Amazon’s most aggressive push to date in sports content. It also has the potential to pump even more value into Amazon’s Prime Video platform, while serving as a perk to the Prime subscription program, which now has more than 150 million paid members around the world.
For Amazon, its streaming video service has always served a greater purpose than just being a tool to compete with streaming rivals such as Netflix and Hulu.
Prime Video is part of Amazon’s acclaimed “flywheel” of compelling consumer offers. The idea is that Prime Video will entice more people to join the Prime subscription service, which costs $ 119 per year, leading to more engagement and more purchases on the site.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos succinctly explained why Prime Video is a good business model for the company in a 2016 interview with Recode: “From a business POV for us, we can monetize that content in an unusual way. win., it helps us sell more shoes. “
Sports content and NFL games in particular amplify that value proposition for existing and future Prime subscribers. Sports content can also lure the rapidly increasing share of cord cutters away from other services.
The company already has a service called Amazon Channels, which allows customers to choose the channels they want to subscribe to, such as Starz and HBO, without signing up for a bundle of programs or signing a contract.
Getting a deal with the NFL could make the Amazon Channels service even more tacky by differentiating it from similar offerings that don’t offer sports.
In the longer term, if Amazon manages to release the NFL games exclusively, meaning pulling them off traditional TV, it could serve as a winning pitch for advertisers. Amazon has massive amounts of consumer data, from user interactions with devices linked to its massive Alexa ecosystem to the millions of purchases on its ecommerce site.
Amazon not only understands what shoppers are looking for and buying, but also which ads they click and whether they purchased an item after viewing an ad. So it can assure brands that their ads get to the right people.
Advertising has quickly turned into a major profit engine for Amazon’s overall business. According to a survey by Cowen published in January in 2021 and 2022, Amazon is predicted to be the largest shareholder of the dominant digital ad companies in 2021 and 2022, with ad revenue rising to $ 85.2 billion in 2026. from an projected $ 26.1 billion by 2021.