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FootBiz newsletter #146: Premier League streaming service set to launch
PLUS: Chelsea's record-breaking losses and a huge departure from women's football
Ed Malyon
February 27, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
The Financial Times’ Business of Football summit is usually good for a headline or two, and this year’s edition was no different.
Top of the bill on their promotional materials beforehand was Richard Masters’ appearance, and the Premier League CEO brought the goods by formally announcing the Prem will dip its first toe into the direct-to-consumer world.
Regrettably, perhaps for fear of a lawsuit from a certain streaming titan, the product will not be known as Premflix. Instead, Premier League Plus is the app that will almost certainly (eventually) re-shape how people watch the world’s most popular football league. Starting in Singapore.
“From next season onward, from August, Premier League Plus is going to happen,” Masters said.
“For the first time the Premier League is going to have its own customers. We’re looking to build a business, but we’re also looking to learn to see how that might be replicable around the world.”
Masters headlined the FT summit this week
It’s still a pretty monumental move, however inevitable it has felt . Obviously this doesn’t mean the imminent end of the league’s huge deals with Sky or NBC but going forward it would appear that the league will be able to pick and choose whether it partners with a local broadcaster, some sort of hybrid model or simply decides to go it alone on a territory-by-territory basis. What works for Thailand may not work for Belgium, but the league will have the flexibility to choose and has plenty of runway to take the time to find out.
With the financial health of big media businesses (often legacy cable TV or telecoms providers) increasingly under question and the growth of streaming adoption, a direct-to-consumer model has been speculated about for years, with club owners like Chelsea’s Todd Boehly publicly championing the idea.
It makes sense that the league is starting with a localized trial rather than an immediate global rollout, largely because traditional international broadcast revenues remain highly lucrative, growing by 27% in the latest rights cycle.
Singapore being the testing ground will be done in partnership with the local broadcaster, Starhub, and is expected to launch in August in time for the new season.
“It will be a new app that you can download on your smart TV or laptop. You’ll be able to watch 380 games a season, with lots of shoulder content and a 24/7 dedicated channel," bragged Masters yesterday.
“Will it be replicable elsewhere? That’s what we’re going to find out.”
Premier League Plus is a big opportunity for the league to cut out the middleman
The content for that dedicated channel will partly come from the Premier League Productions vault of programming, a slew of ‘evergreen’ content that was produced during the league’s 20-year partnership with IMG, based out of Stockley Park, and which has partly served to educate overseas audiences on the history of the Premier League and its icons.
Going forwards, the Premier League will be producing their own content out of a new studio in Kensington, west London, after ending that IMG deal. Production will begin this summer, lining up with the launch of the app in Singapore.
Most conversations about this new development immediately leapt into the future to think about what this could mean going down the line. Some predictions follow:
The bottom ~25% of geographies in rights deal value could probably get folded into their new product the next time their rights are up for tender, assuming technological adoption in those territories is deemed sufficient, giving the PL a pretty significant global streaming business in just a couple of years
Saturday 3pm kick-offs would make for some very interesting inventory for a DTC app if the league could get the blackout law changed/expunged. That’s something to watch given that the EFL is also pushing for it
Even if the PL wanted to conserve its biggest broadcast rights deals, it could still carve out one or two matches per gameweek, or on special occasions like Opening Day/Boxing Day, for its own streamer (along the lines of what they attempted with Amazon, or what the NFL do for Netflix).
Helpfully, there were plenty of Premier League executives wandering the room after Masters’ big reveal who were willing to discuss these latest developments.
And the overwhelming attitude towards the league’s DTC offering from the clubs was that it remains a wait-and-see proposition. Newcastle’s new CEO David Hopkinson told The Athletic “we’re going to learn lots” from how things go in Singapore, while Aston Villa executive Francesco Calvo neatly summed up how we feel about the whole project:
“If any league can experiment in this way, it’s the Premier League.”
If Ligue 1 had to dive in the deep end and go DTC from a position of desperation and weakness, the Prem is doing it from a position of enormous strength. The ability to build an in-house hedge against the decline of the traditional media bundle was always a smart idea. Now it’s about to become a living, breathing reality.
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