talkSPORT pundit Simon Jordan’s wish for the Premier League to become ‘the Netflix of Football’ is looking increasingly likely to becoming a reality.
The league’s new CEO, Richard Masters, has revealed they are actively working on plans to launch a Netflix-style digital streaming channel, selling live games direct to fans.
The Premier League’s new CEO Richard Masters has revealed plans to launch a Netflix-style digital streaming channel
Trials of a new ‘Over The Top’ (OTT) service that cuts out traditional broadcasters could start as early as 2022, in select test markets overseas. If successful, it could revolutionise the way football is consumed.
“During the last [rights bidding] process [for the 2019-22 seasons] we spent quite a lot of time and invested a lot of resources in building our expertise and capacity in ‘direct-to-consumer’,” said Masters.
“We considered whether strategically it would be the right time to test a few markets then and decided not to.
“We were ready last time and we will be ready next time should the opportunity arise. Eventually the Premier League will move to a mix of direct-to-consumer and [traditional] media rights sales.”
The Premier League and its teams currently heavily rely on broadcasting revenue, with bosses agreeing a deal in 2015 that run until 2019 that was worth £5.14bn.
Some of the biggest starts in world football ply their trade in the Premier League
But Jordan believes the Premier League can blow those figures out of the water, while also giving fans a cheaper and more effective service, by launching their own worldwide product online.
I think theyve got to become their own broadcaster, set up their own platform and become a VOD video on demand broadcaster,” he said back in December.
Then they would be able to remove the price parameters people are resisting now with the traditional broadcasters.
People are churning off Sky and theyre churning off BT because they dont want to pay £75 or £80 a month, they dont think its justified.
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If you brought in a Netflix of football, got 100million subscribers around the world paying £9 a month, youd have no churn because no one would be able to resist that price point.
Youd bring in £11billion every year rather than £8.1billion every three years, and youd build a model that would have enormous revenues, sustainability capital grown and an unbelievable reach.
Currently any viewer in the UK who wants to watch every Premier League game legally needs to subscribe to Sky, BT Sport and Amazon Prime.
Paying for all three typically costs about £912 a year, or a whopping £76 a month.
‘PremFlix’ is, in all likelihood, still a long way off in the UK – but would be much cheaper than that.
Watch a clip of Simon Jordan on talkSPORT above