Two untaxing wins meant the corporate behemoth arrived quietly – but the smart money says it’s here to stayIf Amazon Prime Video was hopeful its maiden foray into rugby coverage would be the main talking point of the weekend’s international Test match action, its thunder was unceremoniously stolen mere hours before its first broadcast by Sky Sports. After Sky’s viewers were spoiled by the unprecedented sight of Argentina beating the All Blacks in the Tri-Nations, a laboured Scotland win over Italy and routine England rout of Georgia in our own comparatively mundane autumnal jamboree, the Nations Cup, could never hope to compete.“Amazon delivers the rugby,” it told us, the pre-match graphic featuring rampaging and hulking household names carrying brown parcels...
Amazon’s major selling point, that you can watch all the games, is the worst thing about it. You CAN watch them all. Add in social media, and being an armchair fan becomes exhaustingTV to the left of me, laptops to the right, there I was, stuck in the middle with Amazon Prime. Primed for prime on a Tuesday night – waiting like all other broadcasters who hadn’t been asked to take part to see if it fell apart.A centre-forward relies on the service from the wide men. Here Gabby Logan and friends depended on the service of your broadband. And I had no complaints. It ran smoothly and the football happened. Like it always does. Related: Amazon creeps into football’s...
Amazon Prime’s debut night was aiming for continuity, as if you wouldn’t even notice them further monetising your love of footballOne of the lesser known but more frequently thumbed tomes on my bookshelf is something called The Premier League Handbook. Published in the summer of 1992 before the launch of a zippy new competition called the FA Premier League and competitively priced at £3.99, it’s a nostalgic and richly comic artefact, a sepia-tinted window into the hoopla and razzmatazz that greeted English football’s brave new dawn.And so in among the usual season previews (Dean Saunders and Jason Dozzell were among the “players to watch” that year) was a six-page feature on an upstart young broadcaster called Sky Sports, which was...
For once, emotions are genuinely stirred by the story of Rwanda and how the game helped heal its divisionsIt can be hard in England to get a feel for the scale, the power and – yes really – the beauty of the Premier League’s vast global reach. Probably this has something to do with the way it is reflected back, most often through the wild frontier, the cranks’ rodeo, the Hobby Horse Derby of social media.More toxic still is the way the Premier League’s commercial success is so often described as simply this and nothing more, couched in tones of crowing economic triumphalism that reduces its devotees to numbers, eyeballs, units of desire. Related: Back to the future: Bradford bring...