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Amazon is poised to complete a long-expected expansion in its regional sports streaming efforts.
The online retail and streaming giant is closing in on an agreement with bankrupt Diamond Sports Group to stream most of the Bally Sports parent company’s content, according to a report in the New York Post. Fans could pay approximately $20 per month to Amazon to gain access to regional teams. The pact has been expected since early this year, and more so in recent weeks—even after Amazon dropped out of a prior agreement to provide DSG with $115 million post-exit financing to aid its emergence from bankruptcy.
The agreement, at least at the outset, will involve 27 teams from the NBA, NHL, and MLB for which DSG has digital rights. DSG also airs games for seven other MLB teams, at least for the 2024 season, only on a linear basis as digital rights have been seen as a particularly thorny “gating issue” for some of those clubs.
Amazon and DSG declined to comment.
While this agreement is approaching, DSG is attempting to complete its efforts to emerge from bankruptcy. In a status conference in U.S. Bankruptcy Court earlier this week, the company received formal approval of recently completed NBA and NHL deals and said it is now targeting early- to mid-November to hold a confirmation hearing for its reorganization plan. But MLB is still expressing significant doubts, particularly around DSG’s ability to assert in a timely fashion its ability to air games in 2025.
Before this DSG deal, Amazon had steadily expanded its presence in local sports, acquiring rights to the NHL’s Kraken to add to an existing relationship with MLB’s Yankees. Those deals are part of a portfolio that Amazon now has involving each of the top four U.S. men’s pro leagues in some fashion.
For the teams in which it holds digital rights, DSG already offers its local content through the Bally Sports+ streaming app, costing $19.99 per month in most cases. But that product has had some notable technical issues. Amazon Prime Video, while having a much stronger reputation for reliability, would also offer a major boost in scale to reach consumers.
