NBA on Amazon Prime? It Could Happen

NBA games could end up on Amazon's streaming service in upcoming seasons.

The online shopping platform, which also has a streaming service on Amazon Prime, is in the running to secure the broadcast rights to NBA games in the United States, Front Office Sports reported on Monday.

Amazon already broadcasts NFL games on Thursday nights, a privilege the deep-pocketed company paid $1 billion for.

The tech titan will compete with Comcast, which owns NBC; Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns TNT; and Disney, which owns ABC and ESPN, Front Office Sports reported.

ABC, ESPN and TNT already broadcast professional basketball games, and their parent companies are unlikely to give up those games without a fight.

The NBA wants $75 billion for the rights to broadcast games in the United States.

The bidding starts after the upcoming season — which begins Oct. 24 and ends in mid-June — and the contract will begin in 2025.

The Warners Bros. Discovery subsidiary TNT Sports already secured the rights to broadcast the games in the United Kingdom, various media outlets have reported. 

The television and movie studio paid an undisclosed sum for the privilege of broadcasting professional basketball for a British audience.

Cable subscribers in the United States have been canceling their cable packages in record numbers in recent years as streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime have supplanted traditional television.

In the first quarter of 2023, a record 2.3 million people shed their cable packages, Variety reported in May.

But sporting events still draw large audiences on terrestrial cable.

On average, more than 11 million households tuned in to the NBA Finals last year. The playoffs as a whole averaged more than 5 million per game.