Amazon have made its first foray into live streaming of cricket after bagging the rights for streaming New Zealand-based international matches to India.
The deal with New Zealand Cricket is Amazon Prime Video’s first venture into live sports streaming in India, a market dominated by Star. With this deal, which runs till 2025/26, Prime Video will stream all home New Zealand matches, across formats, including the blockbuster clash when India visit in early 2022. A second India tour will also fall under this rights bracket, with the dates of the tour yet to be declared.
The new rights will come into effect from New Zealand’s 2021/22 home summer.
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With the deal, Prime Video will add cricket to its roster of sports streaming services, including the Premier League and Uefa Champions League in football, and Tennis events, including ATP and WTA, as well as the US Open earlier this year.
Amazon’s interest in cricket is further evidence of the direction sports streaming worldwide is heading in, with Amazon one among a few tech giants, including Facebook, to get involved in live sports streaming OTT (over the top).
Amazon also dipped its toes in cricket last year, when it released The Test, a sports documentary series charting the journey of the Australian cricket team since the 2018 ball-tampering scandal.
Streaming giant @PrimeVideoIN has purchased the exclusive rights to live stream New Zealand-based BLACKCAPS and @WHITE_FERNS matches into India for the next six years. https://t.co/ZYtDqqZKcg #CricketNation
— BLACKCAPS (@BLACKCAPS) November 10, 2020
The potentially game-changing point here is the fact that Amazon chose to enter the Indian cricket market – the biggest in the sport. A sign of how vast the potential in India, and particularly the T20 franchise tournament Indian Premier League, was evident in 2017 when Star shelled out INR 16,347.5 crore ($2.55 billion) for media rights for five years.
Star has since been acquired by Disney, and if Amazon now choose to enter the streaming conversation for the IPL – the most lucrative tournament in the sport – a potential bidding war could come to pass between two massive conglomerates.
However, the flip side to dominance of the OTT platforms is that they typically function on a subscription-based model, meaning cricket viewing will be accessible only to those who can afford to buy a subscription. That means cricket fans will need to fork out more money if they want to watch every ball of every game that they can.
