Amazon Wants in on Regional Sports Networks

Game on!

On Wednesday, Amazon announced it will start offering $20-per-month add-ons to Prime Video for Main Street Sports Group, the owner of 16 regional sports networks. It’s the latest evolution in the à la carte compartmentalization of such networks — and another death knell for cable.

Diamond Sports in the Rough

It took a few extra innings, but Amazon and Main Street have finally come to an agreement after roughly a year of circling each other. When the two first met, Main Street went by Diamond Sports — with networks then-branded as Bally Sports — and had recently filed for bankruptcy as it struggled to pay the massive contracts it agreed to for rights in the markets those networks served. 

In short, the company paid huge sums to air events such as Suns games in Phoenix and Reds games in Cincinnati, only to be crunched by the mass exodus of cord-cutters. 

By early 2024, Amazon swooped in to offer a $115 million lifeline in exchange for the rights to local broadcasts — only to rescind the offer by the time August rolled around. Diamond had found a new investor group, changed its name to Main Street, and inked a new naming rights deal to rebrand its networks from Bally Sports to FanDuel Sports.

Now, Amazon and Main Street are back together, as the e-commerce/cloud computing/digital media giant dives even further into big sports:

• The add-on packages will allow fans in markets including Los Angeles, Miami, and Oklahoma City to watch their local MLB, NBA, and NHL teams that have deals with Main Street — with availability restricted to those markets alone.
• The deal comes after Main Street and FanDuel in December also started offering fans the ability to buy the rights to individual games, à la carte, for $6.99 a pop — essentially also offering a weeknight NBA or NHL game as a pay-per-view event.

Win/Lose: The deal is a win for sports junkies who lost access to their hometown teams after cutting the cable cord — and yet another loss for cable providers, who are quickly losing their foothold as exclusive homes for live sports. Next year, the NBA will disappear from Warner Bros Discovery’s TNT cable outfit, with some national games moving to Amazon’s Prime Video instead as part of the league’s new media rights deal. Meanwhile, Disney is working fast to offer ESPN — which will maintain NBA games in the new deal — as a standalone streaming product, no cable deal necessary.