Amazon is spending billions of dollars to make sure fans have to get Prime to watch the Raptors lose.
Driving the news: Amazon Prime and the NBA are close to a deal that will give the streamer exclusive rights to a significant package of regular season and playoff games beginning in the 2025-2026 season, per The Athletic.
- Amazon is reportedly interested in securing global broadcast rights, as well, so unlike most sports broadcasting deals struck recently, this one could directly impact Canadians.
- The deal would mark the biggest sports rights pact made by a streaming platform and would catapult Amazon into the same league as Fox, ESPN, NBC and other major sports broadcasters.
Catch-up: Just last week, Amazon secured exclusive rights to all Monday-night NHL games in Canada for the next two seasons, the league's first exclusive broadcast deal with a digital-only streaming service in Canada.
Why it matters: With sports broadcast deals being broken up into multiple packages across different streamers and networks, fans will have to shell out a lot more to watch games than what they've been paying for their cable bundle.
- As Playmaker Capital’s Adam Seaborn told The Peak: “Now that we're unbundling sports channels from cable, fans are going to realize the real cost of these sports deals.”
Zoom out: As deep-pocketed tech companies show a willingness to outbid traditional broadcasters for sports rights, Rogers and Bell could soon face some of the same challenges U.S. networks are now grappling with to hang on to lucrative live sports rights.
- Sports have been one bright spot for broadcasters, bucking the broader decline of live TV audiences.
- In the last seven years, Canadians' time watching sports has jumped 3% while overall TV viewership has seen a staggering 28% decline.
What’s next: Similar to a recent pact between Fox, Warner Bros. and Disney to combine their sports rights under one streaming service, some experts suggest that Bell and Rogers — which have broadcast rights, TV networks, and ownership stakes in several teams — could follow suit with a similar product in Canada.—LA