Amazon Keeps Pouring Gasoline on Its Sports Strategy

GREAT TEW, England — When Charlie Neiman joined Amazon in 2016, the company had never streamed a live sporting event, and there wasn’t even a budget to try. A decade later, Neiman leads a global live sports giant that aspires to one day broadcast a Super Bowl.

“It’s been a wild ride,” Neiman tells Front Office Sports at the IMG x RedBird Summit 2025, a three-day conference in the U.K. focused on the future of sports.

It wasn’t “preordained” that Amazon would find this much success in sports, Neiman says. It started with early experiments in Europe with Premier League rights, but has evolved into a strategy that touches nearly every major league in every major market in the U.S. 

Amazon’s NFL relationship began in 2017, with an agreement to broadcast 10 regular-season games on a nonexclusive basis. Today, Amazon exclusively broadcasts Thursday Night Football and will have one wild-card playoff matchup as part of a $1 billion per year media-rights deal. It’s gearing up for its first season under the NBA’s new rights deal, which will see Amazon Prime Video exclusively broadcast 66 regular-season games, games from the in-season tournament, plus playoff games. Starting next year, it will be a domestic broadcaster of The Masters. It also has agreements with the NWSL and WNBA.

“Looking back, we’ve really gone from zero to 60,” Neiman says.

He credits Amazon’s willingness to take big swings. “We’re a big company, but we’ll take bets,” he says. “Sports is one of them. You can’t dip your toe in sports. These things are expensive; they take engineering resources. If it works, you pour gasoline on the fire.”

Amazon is looking to build on the foundation it has developed by reshaping what a sports broadcast can be. During his panel at the conference—which was titled “Vision 2050” and also featured the head of product marketing and live media at Nvidia, among others—Neiman talked about proprietary AI models that are already powering new NFL features. For example, Amazon’s data tools can predict with high accuracy when a defender is about to blitz.

“If we see a player deviate from a normal path that we would see in our model, it highlights the player,” he said during the panel. “And with remarkable accuracy, we’re able to predict if someone’s going to blitz.”

Amazon has plans to add other features, such as grading the difficulty of touchdown passes, with the aim of making games easier for casual fans to follow without disrupting the core viewing experience.

“The goal is to make it as simple as possible, so that my parents, who are not necessarily football fans, can understand it,” he tells FOS.

The company intends to expand that approach into its basketball broadcasts—which will feature former NBA stars like Steve Nash, Dirk Nowitzki, and Blake Griffin—although Nieman wouldn’t divulge specifics. The challenge, Neiman said, is figuring out what NBA fans want that’s distinct from football viewers. 

“You can imagine there’s going to be similar things to come for the NBA broadcasts, but we’re not ready to say when and what that is,” he says. “We’re fans ourselves—basketball nerds—and we want the broadcast to feel authentic to that culture.”

One trend that Neiman isn’t so sure Amazon will immediately jump on is buying equity stakes in the leagues it covers, particularly behemoths like the NFL and NBA.

“More interesting to us are the emerging leagues,” he says. “Emerging leagues need partners to help grow and build infrastructure. With how rights fees have gone lately, the incentive is sharing in the upside.”

Editors’ note: RedBird IMI, in which RedBird Capital Partners is a joint venture partner, is the primary investor in Front Office Sports.