Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is sliding lower with the rest of the market as AMZN shares crumble near all-time highs. This is in spite of the news that AMZN is looking to hit Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) where it hurts — live streaming.
According to Bloomberg, Amazon is considering buying the rights to several live sporting events to close the Prime ecosystem loop. This includes baseball, basketball, tennis, rugby, golf, soccer and auto racing.
What’s key is that this would certainly make Amazon Prime stand out among prospective cord-cutters, who previously couldn’t justify pulling the plug on traditional cable due to the lack of sports.
Would they choose Netflix? Not unless NFLX CEO Reed Hastings is busy cooking up live streaming sports deals. But with all those shows he has to juggle, it’s doubtful he is.
Amazon Prime would instead become the go-to destination of the cord-cutter. Sure, Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is beefing up its live sports portfolio, but until you can watch Transparent there, Amazon Prime is the more welcoming offering for cord-cutters.
Tennis Channel Chief Executive Officer Ken Solomon told Bloomberg:
“Amazon has been leaning forward on sports. They want to be a new age MSO … We’ve made it a point to talk with everyone.”
Amazon has certainly made it a point to talk to everyone … everyone in the C-suite, that is.
The company reportedly secured ex-Sports Illustrated executive James DeLorenzo for a new sports division within the company, and even hired a former YouTube exec, Charlie Neiman, who will be in charge of pairing sports companies with Amazon Prime.
This all comes on top of the latest addition to Amazon’s board, Daniel Huttenlocher, who holds 24 patents related to condensing visual data into symbolic information.
The hard part, however, will be in securing the rights to stream certain high-volume sporting events. And once secured, the price is astronomical. Walt Disney Co (NYSE:DIS) currently pays some $2 billion a year for the rights to the NFL.
At any rate, this is a play that is years off, if it ever happens at all. AMZN stock is now off over 2% in Friday afternoon trading.
As of this writing, John Kilhefner did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
