Sunday, December 29, 2024

Amazon Prime Video’s Premier League coverage ends this week – here’s why

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Premier League fans will enjoy two days of Premier League action on Amazon Prime Video December 26 and December 27, but they will be the last fixtures aired by the streaming platform.

Amazon has had access to two full Premier League match days per season for the last six years, but the Christmas week fixtures – headlined by eight games on Boxing Day and two more tomorrow – will be the last of the broadcasting deal with the Premier League.

The Prime Video coverage was unique, as it offered all ten games per Matchday exclusively live via the streaming platform, with no kick-off times blacked out.

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However, the 20-game-a-season package was not offered by the Premier League when the new rights arrangements went up for auction last year. As such, from the 2025-2026 season, all Premier League teams will go back to bring split between Sky Sports and TNT Sports (formerly BT Sport).

The Athletic published a piece this morning reporting that if Amazon had wanted to continue broadcasting Premier League games beyond this season, it would have needed to pay more than ten times the £30 million per season it had been shelling out during its relationship with league.

“Amazon chose not to be involved,” report said. “Their neat, little 20-game package was no longer available when the Premier League ran their auction last year, with the smallest available, offering 56 games a season, bought by TNT. The other four packages predictably went to Sky, the Premier League’s longest-standing ally.”

It continued: “A union between the Premier League and Amazon was supposed to drum up long-term competition, opening the door for more streaming platforms to inject new life into the market. Instead, it is back to the old guard of Sky and TNT, whose financial commitments still cannot be surpassed.”

For some football fans, the availability through Amazon Prime was the only way they could watch live Premier League games at home. Millions of households have a Prime subscription as part of their monthly/annual budgeting for shopping purposes, and this was a great bonus.

Amazon has also been very liberal in offering free trials during this time, in order to try and win new memberships. That goes away after today and you’ll need access to TNT or Sky to watch any live Premier League football legally, at home from next season.

If you do have access to Sky or TNT, there will be 270 of the 380 total games available to watch live, though. That’s a record.

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