The grand 2019-2022 Premier League TV rights meat raffle is taking place today and the big news is that Amazon have come hulking into the mix by snaffling up one of the final two broadcast packages.
This means that Amazon will be able to screen two full rounds of fixtures per season, for three seasons from 2019/2020 – thus becoming the first streaming-only service to offer Premier League football.
Specifically, the vast online retailers will show one entire round of midweek matches in early December and one round of matches over the Christmas bank holiday.
The matches will be streamed via Prime Video UK at no extra expense to Prime subscribers, which otherwise costs £7.99 a month or £79 per year.
BT Sport dropped £90million to add the final remaining 20-game package to their collection, meaning that overall they will be shelling out £975million to broadcast 52 live matches per season for three years.
Sky Sports still have hold of the four choice packages, which they paid £3.5billion to acquire in February.
So, the upshot is that if you want to (lawfully) watch all the top flight matches being broadcast from 2019 onwards, you’ll need a Sky Sports subscription (£70-odd per month all in), BT Sport (£50-ish) and Amazon Prime.
Can they not see that this spiralling inflation is unsustainable for their customers? No wonder illegal streaming is rife.