With streamers’ acquisition of live sports rights already a big story in 2024, April saw Amazon, Rogers Communications and the NHL announced a sublicensing deal making Prime Video the home of Monday Night Hockey games in Canada for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 NHL seasons. These are the last two seasons in Rogers’ current 12-year, $5.23m (CAD) deal for the national NHL rights in Canada.

This will be Amazon’s first major sports rights deal in Canada (aside from an existing contract for the ONE Championship across Canada and the US) and follows a pattern the service has shown previously, involving entering a market with a minority package of games to a top-tier competition. An early example was the English Premier League (EPL) in the UK, where Amazon acquired a package of 20 games per season across two game weeks in December to coincide with the Christmas and New Year shopping periods, aiming to drive traffic to its retail platform through subscriptions to Prime Video.

However, that EPL deal has not been renewed for the next cycle of rights beginning with the 2025-26 season, and instead it has acquired rights to one UEFA Champions League (UCL) match in each game week starting from the 2024-25 season, in line with its other UCL deals in Germany and Italy. This indicates that while customer acquisition around busy retail periods was Amazon’s initial aim when acquiring sports rights, it has subsequently switched its focus to retaining customers’ interest across longer periods of time. Another example of this is Amazon's Thursday Night Football deal with the NFL in the US, which gives weekly games throughout the regular season.  

This NFL deal is possibly Amazon’s most comparable deal to its NHL Monday Night Hockey agreement. Both deals include only regular-season games; and neither package includes games held at the weekend. Based on reports in the US, we estimate Amazon to be paying $1.1bn (USD) per season for its current NFL rights, giving the streaming service 17 games at a price of $64.7m per game. This amounts to 1.5 times the average price paid per game among all broadcasters in the 2023-24 season ($42.9m).

Using a similar ratio, based on an average price per game of $2.35m CAD being paid by Rogers in the last two seasons of its NHL deal (during which Amazon’s sub-license takes place), we would expect Amazon to be paying an estimated $3.52m per game for its reported (minimum of) 26 games per season, or $91.5m CAD per season.

Amazon’s blueprint of paying a premium for the option of packaging up specifically-selected rights when entering a market indicates how rightsholders who want to attract the streaming service might want to package their assets. For instance, of the countries where Amazon Prime (the retail service) is currently available, Amazon has yet to invest in a top-tier property in major sports rights markets such as Spain, India and Japan. Major sports properties in these countries – the likes of LaLiga in Spain or the IPL in India – might want to consider minority packages of meaningful games, spread throughout the season, that would be available to bidders on an exclusive basis.