The UEFA Champions League quarter final last month between Bayern Munich and Manchester City may have seen the German giants knocked out. But there was reason for cheer among streaming executives in Germany at least, after the first-leg game broke Amazon’s streaming records in the country,  with 4m households, almost a third of the entire German subscriber base, tuning in to watch the game. 

There may yet be room for further viewing growth for Amazon, however, if a German team makes it to the semi-final in an upcoming season. Amazon has secured broadcasting rights to a single, Tuesday night, leg of each game in the knockout rounds (but not the final) until the end of the 2026-27 season, while DAZN has rights to broadcast the remaining matches.

Amazon’s record-breaking viewership reflects an increased preference among German consumers to watch sports via an online streaming service: According to Ampere’s Sports Consumer’s latest wave, only 28% of sports fans in Germany prefer to watch sport purely via broadcast TV, with 39% now actively preferring to watch solely via streaming, up from 24% last year. 

Despite sports streaming being subject to some latency issues –certainly an issue in the early days of live streaming - this willingness to watch live sports content via streaming is increasingly important as more sports rights go to streamers in Germany, with DAZN also holding Bundesliga rights.

Attractive pricing is a key way to drive viewership for such competitions: The price for an Amazon Prime subscription of €8.99 per month (or €89.90 per year) falls below the €10 per month that German fans of the Champions League said they were, on average, willing to pay to watch the competition in Ampere’s latest Sports consumer survey. 

Though Amazon splits the UEFA Champions League rights with DAZN, the perceived value of the existing Amazon Prime Video catalogue and the wider Amazon ecosystem may still make the service’s current price point very attractive for German sports fans. The sub-€10 per month pricing, that now includes live streaming of what is the second most popular competition among German sports fans, may also help to slow down subscriber churn amid a period of high inflation, even following last year’s price hike of around 30% from the previous €6.99/€69.90.