Amazon’s Prime Video is expanding its marquee sports nights offering, with the streaming service set to be the exclusive home of Monday Night NHL games in Canada under a new deal with the pro hockey league and telecom provider Rogers Communications.
Prime Video already boasts NFL’s Thursday Night Football in the U.S., and now the new two-year agreement sets up Prime Monday Night Hockey in Canada. The deal, announced Thursday, is the NHL’s first exclusive national broadcast package with a digital-only streaming service in Canada and will see Prime Video stream all regular season Monday night NHL games in English for the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 hockey seasons.
The Prime Video-produced NHL package plans to sport a new broadcast team delivering analysis and play-by-play coverage.
The deal builds on earlier relationships between Amazon, the NHL and Rogers. Rogers has long held exclusive Canadian broadcast NHL rights since inking a prior 12-year deal in 2013, which utilized the telecom provider’s sports network subsidiary Sportsnet. Sportsnet, meanwhile, launched on Prime Video Channels in Canada at the start of the 2023-24 hockey season. The NHL has also worked with Amazon’s AWS since 2021 for in-game analytics and video highlights for enhanced viewing experiences.
Prime Video executives have previously pointed to sports as a key addition in offering customers more value from their streaming subscription as the platform aims to be a one-stop entertainment hub - a sentiment echoed in today’s announcement.
“With Prime Monday Night Hockey, we’re offering our customers even more from their Prime membership,” said Magda Grace, head of Prime Video, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in a statement. “We’re committed to driving more innovation for fans as we bring the NHL into more Canadian homes and across more devices on Monday nights than ever before.”
Prime Video has been working to enhance the sports viewing experience, including delivering low-latency and high quality. It’s not always an easy task as the streaming service looks to deliver feeds as close to real-time as possible at scale, across a variety of device and distribution partners that have their own capabilities. Prime Video’s BA Winston and Andrew Bennett recently discussed the challenges and company efforts on technical capabilities for live sports streaming on the platform, for more on that, read here.
As for the NHL, the league pointed to an innovative viewing experience and reaching new audiences.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with Amazon and Rogers on this project. Amazon has a strong track record of presenting sports on Prime Video in a highly innovative and viewer-friendly manner,” said David Proper, NHL Senior EVP of Media & International Strategy, in a statement. “We are committed to serving hockey fans and reaching new audiences with our robust content distribution strategy that brings viewers exciting NHL content to a multitude of streaming services. With this groundbreaking partnership, we are continuing to stay true to that goal.”