The NBA media dominoes are beginning to fall, with Amazon now said to be on the brink of a deal.
Amazon and the NBA have agreed to a “framework” of a media rights agreement that will include regular season and postseason games on Prime Video, including potential conference finals, Andrew Marchand of The Athletic reported Friday.
While the deal is no surprise — Amazon has long been mentioned as a likely contender for NBA rights — any deal would mark a milestone for both the streamer and the NBA. No NBA game has ever aired exclusively on a streaming service, making the league an outlier among the “Big Four.” Amazon would become home to two of the “Big Four” leagues and carry playoff inventory from both.
Left unmentioned in the Marchand report was any mention of local rights, which Amazon is believed to be pursuing.
The Amazon news comes one day after John Ourand of Puck reported that ESPN is close to a deal to keep the NBA’s “A” package, including the NBA Finals. Per The Athletic, which reported the same on Friday, ESPN’s deal would include about 20 fewer regular season games than it currently airs.
The NBA is expected to create a third package of games out of inventory shed from its “A” and “B” packages. Assuming that Amazon is bidding for that third — or “C” — package, the only inventory left would be the “B” package currently carried by Warner Bros. Discovery.
Reporting in Puck, The Wall Street Journal and now The Athletic points to Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast (NBC) battling for that final remaining package. The NBA could theoretically split the remaining inventory among two partners. NASCAR went to market with three packages last year and ended up with four.
The ESPN and Amazon deals are believed to span at least a decade, and it is presumably the case that the remaining package would as well.
