Amazon Scores Another Goal Against Sky With German Soccer Rights
Amazon Scores Another Goal Against Sky With German Soccer Rights
(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. is starting to chisel away at Sky’s dominance of sports broadcasting in Europe’s biggest economy.
The U.S. e-commerce giant secured rights to stream some European Champions League soccer games to German viewers, it said. The competition is prime sports real estate, featuring top clubs such as Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Manchester City.
“We’re delighted to bring the top-pick Tuesday matches to our customers from 2021,” Alex Green, who heads Amazon’s sports streaming business in Europe, said in a statement. The company declined to say how much it paid.
Comcast Corp.’s Sky and billionaire Len Blavatnik’s streaming company DAZN currently share broadcasting of the tournament in Germany, where soccer is a major driver of pay-TV subscriptions.
Amazon has already secured a foothold in Sky’s crucial U.K. market and showed the first Premier League matches to millions of viewers on its Prime Video service last week without major technical glitches.
Sky said the tender of German rights to the Champions League is still ongoing, and declined to comment further. DAZN said it’s awaiting the outcome of the process.
Amazon’s push into sport is designed to boost demand for its streaming platform and encourage more people to sign up for Prime shopping membership, which offers faster online deliveries.
To contact the reporters on this story: Stefan Nicola in Berlin at snicola2@bloomberg.net;David Hellier in London at dhellier@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rebecca Penty at rpenty@bloomberg.net, Thomas Pfeiffer
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