eSports And Sports On A Convergence Course At Amazon
Amazon is said to be “exploring” a live sports offering according to the Wall Street Journal. It appears Amazon is specifically targeting international rights for the NBA, Mexican soccer, MLB, and NFL.
Amazon already has a strong streaming infrastructure in place, with Amazon Web Services and while Amazon’s video streaming service, Amazon Prime is not a live service, Amazon’s eSports service, Twitch, is. In fact, it's one of the biggest live streaming networks in the world and already available in 213 countries. Twitch.tv streams computer games like League of Legends, Hearthstone and Overwatch - Twitch’s top 1, 2 and 5 ranked channels, respectively, by average viewership.
The NFL’s Chicago Bears linebacker, Kyle Long is on Twitch. So are a lot of other professional athletes and their fans. According to Twitch's stats, Long is mostly active in the NFL off-season with several hundred thousand views and 23,000+ followers.
eSports and live professional sports do not share the same audiences, right? They don't even share the same sports. That is, until they do. Players like Kyle Long are bringing sports and eSports together when they play Rocket League and King of the Hill on Twitch.
Speaking of NFL, the computer game, it has a very popular channel on Twitch-- ranked #73 of 29,000+ channels on Twitch. The majority of the top viewed channels on Twitch are not traditional sports games, the top 7 channels on Twitch over the last 30 days are mostly first-person shooter games. However, #8 is FIFA Soccer, #26 is Poker, and #32 NBA. Four sports that could be pulled from a typical sports network’s programming guide break into the top 100 channels on Twitch.
The top traditional sport on Twitch is soccer with viewers consuming 15 years, 7 months, 0 days and 17 hours over the last 30 days according to SullyGnome. Poker is the next ranked program that gets regular airplay on traditional sports networks with 3 years, 6 months, 20 days and 3 hours viewed over the last 30 days.
With four sports channels in the top 100 on Twitch, and fans of those sports spending hundreds of thousands of hours viewing each month, the data indicates it makes a lot of sense for Amazon to bring eSports and traditional sports fans together.
Amazon seems to be in the catbird seat here: they can see which sports are best suited for a new live streaming sports service, they have a unique live streaming capability in Twitch, and they can count on some level of convergence between pro sports fans and eSports fans, thanks to eSports-loving pro athletes like Kyle Long.
