Marine was elated. He had talked to Silver for years about Amazon’s interest in the NBA. Earlier this year, he had breakfast with Silver in which the two kibitzed about working for icons as their respective bosses: Marine had spent decades working for Jeff Bezos at Amazon; Silver had worked for years for former NBA commissioner David Stern.
A deal came together quickly soon after the call, culminating in an announcement Wednesday that will have Amazon pay nearly $20 billion over 11 years for NBA and WNBA games, including six NBA conference finals, the annual playoff play-in tournament and three WNBA Finals.
Suddenly, Amazon, already home to the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football,” is a major broadcaster of the two most popular North American leagues — with rights to playoff games in each.
“This is not some small streaming package,” Marine said in an interview Wednesday. “This is one of three major packages.” He added: “We will now have 12 months of sports, and the good news is that it’s working. Which is why you see us make another very large investment.”
The NBA–Amazon deal is worth $1.8 billion annually over those 11 years, according to people familiar with the figures, and when it goes into effect the company, founded 30 years ago as an online book seller in Bezos’s garage, will be spending nearly $5 billion a year on sports rights in North America and Western Europe. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)
But Amazon’s NBA deal did not work out exactly as TNT anticipated, and that longtime NBA partner is not included in the new deals announced this week. TNT has attempted to match Amazon’s terms — and keep the rights — based on a provision in its previous contract. The NBA declined TNT’s match, pushing ahead with Amazon, though it’s possible the dispute winds up in court. Marine declined to comment on TNT, saying only, “We’re moving forward.”
American sports leagues and teams have been waiting for years for tech companies to move into live sports, particularly as the traditional buyers of sports rights struggle through the disruption of linear and cable TV. Why? Capital. Amazon is valued at $2 trillion, compared with $7 billion for Paramount, the parent company of CBS, and around $20 billion for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns TNT Sports.
Netflix outbid Amazon and will air NFL games on Christmas Day next season, and Google’s YouTube last season took over Sunday Ticket, the NFL’s out-of-market package that for years aired on DirectTV. Apple has a deal with Major League Soccer and has done a small deal with Major League Baseball.
But it’s Amazon and its more than 200 million Prime members worldwide, more than any other tech behemoth, that has shown the biggest commitment to shell out billions for sports.
“The NBA is tripling its rights fees because Amazon got involved,” said Mark Shapiro, president and chief operating officer of Endeavor and TKO, the parent company of WWE and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Added another high-level executive in sports media, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss companies the executive does business with: “If you’re a league looking for a 10-year deal and you’re saying who am I going to be with in 10 years, you’re picking Amazon, not Warner.”
Amazon slowly built its sports portfolio, adding the NFL (including a game on Black Friday), NASCAR and the WNBA Finals, as well as Champions League soccer and Grand Slam tennis events in Europe. It owns a piece of the YES Network, which broadcasts New York Yankees games, and recently proposed an investment in some regional cable sports networks. With the long-anticipated NBA deal announced if not quite official, one question hanging over the sports industry is how much more Amazon wants. Marine isn’t exactly sure.
“I believe we will be a major sports broadcaster in every major market around the globe,” he said. “In terms of what does that mean? How many properties? I don’t know.”
Moving into the stream
Amazon launched Prime Video, its streaming service, in 2011 as a way to boost sign-ups for Prime membership, which offered two-day shipping to Amazon shoppers. Its first original show launched two years later: “Alpha House,” a political comedy starring John Goodman. The push into live sports came in 2017, when Amazon began simulcasting “Thursday Night Football” and acquired the rights to exclusively stream the U.S. Open tennis tournament in the United Kingdom. The goal, Marine said, was to be a first mover.
Netflix had been streaming since 2007 but still hadn’t dabbled in live sports.
“There’s not an inherent reason why sports won’t move over,” Marine recalled thinking. “So why don’t we get started first?”
Cable TV’s collapse — there are some 40 million fewer homes paying for a TV bundle than in 2011 — began with entertainment. Live sports were a riskier proposition, with concerns about whether streamers could attract big audiences and deliver the technology required to support them.
Amazon’s U.K.-only U.S. Open deal eventually led to its landmark partnership with the Premier League to show exclusive games starting in the 2019 season. Marine recalled being in the office for the first day of coverage with a group of 200 engineers, cheering and crying, watching the sign-ups roll in and the technology hold up. The media research firm Ampere Analysis estimates that some 30,000 people signed up for Prime on the coverage’s peak day.
In the United States, Amazon remained on the periphery, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. According to multiple people familiar with the talks, Amazon offered more money than NBC for the Big Ten’s Saturday night football package in 2022. The conference chose NBC instead, in part because university presidents were concerned about fans finding the games on a streaming platform.
But that fall, Amazon quieted any doubts when it debuted its exclusive “Thursday Night Football” broadcasts, after shelling out around $1 billion a year for the rights. Amazon hired established broadcasters Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit to call the games, and it debuted an alternate broadcast that allowed viewers to see the entire field for the first time — one of the most notable advancements in sports viewing in recent memory. The tech has been mostly seamless.
Fewer people are watching “Thursday Night Football” than when it was broadcast on Fox. But Amazon’s viewership jumped more than 20 percent last season. “The NFL changed the way people looked at us,” Marine said. (One of the first people to congratulate Amazon on the viewership increase, Marine said, was Bill Koenig, the NBA’s point person on rights negotiations.)
And for a company such as Amazon, ratings are not the best measure of success. Amazon wants to add — and retain — Prime customers and keep them shopping. Ampere estimated that Prime Video received around 100,000 new sign-ups on its peak day leading into its first exclusive NFL game. (NBC’s Peacock, which has many fewer subscribers — around 30 million — attracted around 3 million new subscribers over three days around its exclusive NFL playoff game season.)
Amazon declined to comment on Ampere’s research, but one company executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal figures, called that estimate low.
It all means the power dynamics of Amazon’s relationship to sports is fundamentally different from that of a traditional media partner. Take Amazon’s proposed $115 million investment in Diamond Sports, which would help the beleaguered owner of some 20 regional sports networks sort out a messy bankruptcy. (Diamond’s bankruptcy proceedings are still in flux, as is final approval of Amazon’s deal by a federal bankruptcy court.)
The investment, if approved, would allow fans to purchase Diamond Sports’ local RSN channels through Prime Video. It would also keep Diamond’s contracts intact, making it harder for the leagues to either pool all their teams’ rights, sell them to someone else or some combination. ESPN and Fanatics have contemplated getting into local streaming, according to Puck.
One high-ranking league executive said the Diamond deal was good for Amazon but perhaps not for the leagues, which in some cases had expressed to Amazon that they were ready to move on from Diamond, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The executive noted that Amazon has essentially taken no risk; it can pull out if Diamond doesn’t emerge from bankruptcy, and if Diamond survives, Amazon has jumped to the front of the line on local sports distribution without an auction for the rights. “Give them credit, they made themselves a hell of a deal,” said the executive. “They have market power.”
Or consider CBS and Fox, which have built their entire businesses around the NFL. Amazon is a multitrillion dollar company without sports.
“CBS without the NFL is zero,” said Rich Greenfield, founder of LightShed Partners, a media venture fund. “Amazon without the NFL is fine. That’s a scary place to be.”
Using sports to sell more ‘everything’
At this year’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas, Marine, 51, sat at breakfast in the corner of a hotel bistro on the Strip. The entire sports industrial complex had descended on the city — executives, athletes, agencies, every form of hanger-on. Now Marine was contemplating the big news from the week: ESPN, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox had just announced the formation of a new streaming platform, the latest strategy from legacy media companies to remake themselves. Regional sports networks, a cash cow for leagues and mainstay for fans, were in a perilous state. Marine was asked whether Amazon was going to be the sports industry’s savior.
“That’s a big statement,” he said. “I would not sit here and say we’re going to save sports.”
A few minutes later, Marine was in Amazon’s hospitality room at the Aria Hotel for an industry happy hour, where blown-up photos of Michaels and Herbstreit dotted video screens and a NASCAR driving simulator was set up in the corner. (Herbstreit had the second fastest time.)
Marine, dressed in a Lululemon hoodie and Nike sneakers, palled around with Ryan Fitzpatrick, the former quarterback turned studio analyst for Amazon. As a camera snapped promotional photos of them, they traded faux boxing punches and then pretended to snap a football. “You be the center, put your hands under my crotch!” Fitzpatrick yelled.
The two often text during NFL games.
“He lets me talk Xs and Os,” Marine said.
“When I got the job, my dad asked if I could get him free Prime,” Fitzpatrick said.
Marine’s job, in some ways, is to bridge the worlds of sports and tech. He went from the Super Bowl to speak on a panel at the NBA’s All-Star Weekend. Asked what was different about the Super Bowl crowd and the tech summits, Marine said: “Fewer hoodies, less Patagonia.” He added: “I can’t beat up anyone here.”
Marine makes regular trips to the league offices to share updates on Amazon, Prime and the evolution of streaming. It’s a bit dreamy for a sports-obsessed kid from the Detroit suburbs who has spent most of his career at Amazon. He was part of the team that launched the Kindle and spent time as Bezos’s chief of staff.
The familiarity with Amazon is important because its business model is different than that of traditional media companies, which rely on selling advertising and charging cable companies to distribute their channels. Amazon is in a different business: using sports to sell more “everything.”
Prime Video launched an ad business this year and it has the tech to show different ads from the same advertiser to different demographics of viewers. Those ads, Amazon said, resulted last NFL season in 80 percent more purchases compared to traditional static ads. And during its Black Friday game, the company said, QR codes that appeared in ads had a more than 350 percent higher engagement rate than during other games. The QR codes in many cases led directly back to Amazon shopping.
“They have the most compelling closed-loop system there is,” Greenfield said. “You’re able to take content that people are immersed in, show them ads on products they might want to consider. Then you know what gets bought directly from your platform.”
As for what comes next, Marine said Amazon is looking at both “tier one” sports that can drive the largest audiences and up-and-coming properties such as women’s sports. “Not the stuff in the middle,” he said.
There aren’t many top rights that will be up in the near term. The NFL, SEC, Big Ten, College Football Playoff, World Series, NHL and now NBA are tied up in long-term deals, mostly with traditional media companies such as ESPN, Fox and NBC. (“They are absolutely a legitimate competitor,” ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro said of Amazon. “But brand matters. ESPN is viewed as a destination for sports over four decades, so we like our position.”)
But those deals, too, will one day come up again.
“Would I like to broadcast the Super Bowl [in the next rights cycle]?” Marine said. “Yes.”
