Skip to main content

Premier League sets up first direct streaming platform

Perhaps the newsiest moment of this week’s Financial Times Football Business summit came when Richard Masters, Premier League chief executive revealed that the league is finally building a direct-to-consumer streaming platform, which will debut next season in Singapore.

The idea has been floating around since before the pandemic, with most people referring to it by the rather tongue-in-cheek moniker “Premflix”. Its real name, we now know, will be Premier League+. Masters called it “an important step” and a “big change” for the world’s most popular football league.

So, what does this all mean? Firstly, the Singapore move should be viewed as an experiment. The Premier League is doing this in a small but mature market and in partnership with a willing broadcaster, StarHub. The stakes, therefore, are relatively low. It gives the league the chance to test its capabilities in all sorts of things it hasn’t had to do before — such as taking subscription payments and pricing its own products — in a small, manageable way.

Once any kinks are ironed out, Masters said the service could potentially be rolled out elsewhere. Clearly the league would not go to all the trouble of building the tech just to sell it to one small market.

But what else might be going on? Some attendees suggested that south-east Asia was such a hotbed of piracy that it made sense for the Premier League to make its move into streaming there. If the price and the product are right, perhaps the league can bring some of that illicit viewing back onside.

Another theory is that the Premier League is simply building a stick to wave at broadcasters during future rights negotiations. By giving itself the option of going direct to consumer, media companies will have to keep paying up.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's no deal say Spurs insiders over Taiwanese takeover

Senior figures at Tottenham Hotspur insisted on Friday that they had not been informed of any deal to sell Daniel Levy’s stake in the club. A business group, Eight Sports Capital — which is said to include a billionaire Taiwanese financier — claimed that it had an agreement in place to buy a 24.99 per cent stake in ENIC, the club’s majority owners, from Levy, who owns 29.88 per cent. The Times has been told Ng Wing Fai and Brooklyn Earick form part of the group, having both been linked previously to potential takeovers of the Premier League club. The Taiwanese businessman, Richard Tsai, is also said to be part of the consortium. He is reportedly worth £7 billion.  Last year Earick, the former DJ and tech entrepreneur, was part of an attempted £4.5 billion takeover, which was “unequivocally rejected” by Spurs.  An ENIC spokesperson said: “We can confirm that neither ENIC nor THFC are aware of any sale by Daniel Levy’s Family Trust of its minority stake in ENIC, THFC’...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spurs CEO attacks luxury training base

The Tottenham Hotspur chief executive Vinai Venkatesham has issued a withering assessment of the way the club was run under Daniel Levy, likening the state-of-the-art training centre to a five-star hotel rather than a centre of high performance.  Venkatesham was appointed to his role in April 2025, having stepped down as chief executive at Arsenal the previous summer. However, he has said that some aspects of the club were “in a significantly worse state” than he expected.  “Our training centre is amazing, one of the best, if not the best in the world,” Venkatesham told BBC Sport. “But when you look around, it looks more like a five-star hotel than it does a performance environment. That will change over the summer. I think there are many areas where the club hasn’t got the right level of expertise.”  He explained that the football side of operations was the club’s main downfall when he arrived last year. [One Spurs fan wryly observed that it was like a water company sayi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fulham requires big funding from owner

After lengthy delays, Fulham’s shiny, new Riverside Stand has finally opened, creating “a unique Thameside destination with first class facilities for supporters and partners on match days, as well as for the wider community year-round”. This ambitious project has increased Craven Cottage’s capacity by around 4,000 to 29,600, while it has also taken advantage of the club’s fantastic location and wealthy catchment area by including two Michelin star restaurants, a rooftop swimming pool, corporate hospitality and event space, all benefiting from views of the Thames. Chief executive Alistair Mackintosh observed, “Fulham is the sort of club that can have a business class or first class and have fans that turn left on a plane.” Indeed, there is also an exclusive members club – with a football season ticket as an optional extra. It’s fair to say that “the times they are a-changing”, as this is a long way from the traditional pie and a pint. However, in a world where clubs face the tw...
Post a Comment
Read more