Biggest story of 2025 for Prime Video: NBA debut
Biggest story of 2025 for Prime Video: NBA debut
Amazon paid a pretty penny for the rights to the first-ever NBA package specifically intended for a streaming service.
While Prime Video has no doubt continued to roll on with an impressive content slate in 2025, the streamer hasn’t had as many major headlines as other streaming services. Amazon, for example, didn’t take part in the pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery (as far as we know), and unlike years past, the company has also not made any major reveals about the streamer’s subscriber totals or offered hints about its profitability.
That isn’t to say that Prime Video stood pat in 2025. The streamer not only put out new seasons of originals like “Fallout,” it also expanded its sports offerings over the course of the year. No debut has been bigger for Amazon’s streaming service, however, than the arrival of the NBA in October.
Prime Video had an impressive lineup of live sports before the NBA came to the service, including WNBA and NWSL games, and of course, the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football.” Viewers can also supplement their sports lineup on Prime Video with additional subscriptions to streamers like DAZN, Paramount+, Peacock, and FanDuel Sports Network for regional sports action.
But until this year, “TNF” was the only nationally available property Prime Video had from the top four sports leagues in the United States. The streamer does partner to stream some New York Yankees games in that team’s home market, and also partners with the Seattle Kraken in that team’s TV footprint. But the availability of NBA games starting in the 2025-26 regular season was a game-changer for Prime Video.
Amazon had quite a battle to get its hands on the rights to NBA games, as well. The league was set to move away from its longtime partnership with Turner Sports, and sell its three national rights parcels to ESPN, NBCUniversal, and Amazon, when Warner Bros. Discovery exercised a contract provision with the league that allowed it to match a competing bid. The conflict led to a lawsuit, which was settled last November, clearing the way for the deal with Amazon to move forward.
Prime Video struggled to find its footing with sports and related programming for a few years. The most glaring example in recent memory is when, in 2022, the service launched a daily programming block of original sports talk, available free to customers on its video platforms. But the service really didn’t have the kind of dedicated, daily sports audience to support such an ambitious programming idea, and Amazon shut down the bloc in 2023.
Now, the streamer is using some of those same ideas in a more measured approach to its sports talk offerings. For example, the streamer recently launched “Good Sports,” a new comedy sports talk series hosted by Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson. The addition of live regular season and playoff NBA games will naturally keep customers more engaged with Prime Video, and now it can carefully build offerings like “Good Sports” around the games instead of dumping a huge amount of content on an audience it hasn’t cultivated first.
The launch of a streaming-only package of NBA games is also an experiment that other leagues will be watching with interest. The NFL may be able to start negotiations for its next broadcast deals as
early as 2026, and it has been developing relationships with multiple streaming services over the past decade. Its existing partnership with Prime Video, combined with data regarding the streaming success of NBA games on the service, could convince the league — or other leagues in the future — to give Prime Video a larger slice of their inventory.
It’s early days for the NBA and Prime Video, but the streamer seems determined to make the relationship pay off. At a price tag of nearly $2 billion annually for its NBA package, that would seem like a given, and it’s critical for Prime Video to bring a healthy audience to its slate of games. Whether that leads to bigger and better things for the streamer is a question for the future, but the debut of NBA games on Prime Video this fall was the service’s biggest headline of the year.
Prime Video
Prime Video is a subscription video streaming service that includes on-demand access to 10,000+ movies, TV shows, and Prime Originals like “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” “Jack Ryan,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The Boys,” and more. Subscribers can also add third-party services like Max, Showtime, STARZ, and dozens more with Prime Video Channels. Prime Video also offers exclusive live access to NFL Thursday Night Football.