Just about one year after its launch, Amazon Prime Video is dissolving “Sports Talk,” a 12-hour lineup of daily talk shows covering sports at the end of October. The decision has been made on the precipice of media rights negotiations for the National Basketball Association, a property that the over-the-top (OTT) streaming service could reportedly have interest in as the rights hit the open market.
Programs were produced in tandem with Embassy Row, a television and digital production company owned by Sony, and concludes the company’s initial foray into this kind of studio programming to complement its live game broadcasts. News of the cancelation was first reported by Richard Deitsch of The Athletic in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The programming lineup had launched with the addition of seven new shows to the lineup, including programming hosted by Cari Champion, Madelyn Burke and Ben Lyons among others. Amazon Prime Video currently pays the National Football League a reported $1.1 billion annually for the rights to Thursday Night Football, along with the league’s inaugural Black Friday football game. Other sports coverage from the entity includes broadcasts of select New York Yankees baseball games, Overtime Elite and the WNBA, along with several documentaries.
“We are dipping our toe,” Marie Donoghue, vice president of U.S. sports content and partnerships at Amazon in an interview with Andrew Marchand of the New York Post ahead of the launch last November. “We’re testing and learning, but we are very excited about it.”
Future pursuits to expand Amazon Prime Video’s sports portfolio are largely unknown; however, the company is reporting overall viewership gains in the opening weeks of the second season of Thursday Night Football. Nielsen Media Research arrangement to implement internal data from Amazon into its final ratings numbers caused an uproar across the industry, leading the entity to walk back on its plans. Amazon reports its weekly viewership figures using both the traditional Nielsen metrics and the combined data with its own metrics. The property is up 26% year-over-year (YoY) in total viewership, a promising metric as the league looks to blend digital and streaming capabilities with traditional broadcast and cable television.
