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The world is changing quickly and I don't think people understand the changes. There are 200 million Amazon Prime members globally with ~150 million Prime members in the US. With Prime, you get Prime Video for free. There are approximately 124 million TV households in the US, so Prime Video already has the ability to reach at least the same number of TV households in the US.That's the game. Production quality is fine if they want it to be. The issue is achieving universality of access. The network TV channels have it. ESPN has it. FSI falls just short of it. Everything else? Peacock isn't going to have it. Paramount+ isn't going to have it. Hulu isn't going to have it. Apple isn't either. Amazon is closer. The theory is: people want all of X team's games and so will sign up for 3-4 streaming services. No. They won't.
I said it before in these threads, the reason live sports is so valuable is because it's the only thing people watch live. Everything else is DVR or streamed at the time of your choosing. That makes live sports the most valuable thing for advertising supported platforms. It's much less valuable to a subscription-based platform. We've seen that people have very low tolerance for subscription + ads. MLS works better because soccer struggles with advertising compared to U.S. sports with stoppages.
TNT/TBS cover the NCAA tournament free to all of us, with heavy advertising. Let's say Amazon buys those rights. It will need to sell ad space, because that's the value of live sports. I expect Apple and Amazon to come out with a free tier access to the platform. Put the non-advertising supported content behind a pay tier, but broadcast the advertising supported content to anyone on the app. That's what they have to do. In some respects they have that with Fire TV and Apple TV, but they don't have a free "channel".
Prime Video showed 15 NFL Thursday Night football games (with commercials) last year and the average viewership was ~10 million. And, the median age of the viewers was the lowest for the NFL since 2013. I would call Prime Video's first NFL season a success.
ESPN currently has about 74 million subscribers versus a peak of 100 million and the decline continues at ~1 million subscribers per Q. That is why ESPN has pushed ESPN+ to try to stabilize the subscriber base and it is why ESPN is trying to partner with sports leagues to stabilize their content. And, yes, all games streamed on ESPN+ and Amazon include commercials.