Premier League Chair Richard Scudamore indicated that "the door is open" for online broadcasters to "end the reign of BT and Sky" and show live matches across the U.K. for the first time, according to Callum Jones of the LONDON TIMES. Scudamore insisted that there was "no ceiling in sight" after the pair spent £5.14B on three seasons of rights in '15. The league is "technology-neutral" as it prepares to auction the next batch, he said, "amid growing expectation that Amazon, Twitter and Facebook could enter the race." He was speaking days after it emerged that Amazon had bid about
£50M ($65.1M) to show ATP World Tour tennis over five years, "heightening fears among traditional sports broadcasters." Media execs expect the Premier League to put its next cycle of domestic rights, starting from '19, out to tender this year. Scudamore said, "We envisage anybody, really, being able to come along and bid for those rights. We would need some distribution criteria and to make sure it was readily available across platforms and everything else, but as long as it was widely available and distributed properly, we wouldn't rule those out." When asked whether they would participate in the next auction, Sky and Amazon declined to comment (
LONDON TIMES, 8/7).
