Having found its footing with the NFL, Amazon Prime Video is turning its attention to the basketball court.
The streaming giant is introducing a number of new streaming features, including onscreen updates of betting odds during the course of a game, as it gets set to begin its long-term NBA rights deal. The Prime NBA schedule begins October 24 and will feature 67 games in all. The platform will also be a conduit for games via add-on subscriptions like NBA League Pass and FanDuel regional sports networks.
Along with the personalized bet tracking and Odds View, which technically operate through viewers’ FanDuel accounts and not the Prime Video platform, the new features include a fully customizable Multiview. It lets subscribers to Prime Video and League Pass watch a combination of games of their choice on a single screen. Features first rolled out with Thursday Night Football, including Key Moments and Rapid Recap, will also be part of NBA presentations.
Unlike the weekly NFL showcase, there is not yet a dedicated alternative NBA stream where stat-heads can get their fix with analytics and stats. Prime Video product execs, in co-ordination with the production team, therefore sought to strike a balance between injecting some new, actionable information and creating clutter.
“We still recognize that the majority of fans want to turn on the TV, sit back and just watch the game,” Kevin Couch, Sr. Manager, Product, Prime Video, told Deadline in an interview. “All of a lot of the optional features and interactivity can fade to the side and customers may not want those things. But that was how we started with TNF, and we took that same mentality to NBA. But then also we were thinking about, ‘OK, for those fans I want to go deeper and want to engage, how do we bring some of those experiences in and make it easier for them?’”
Although the experience of ramping up features for the NFL provided a foundation for the NBA effort, Couch said the product team took pains not to merely “lift and shift” the experience from one sport to the other.
“There’s a lot of unique things about NBA, so we needed to build some new stuff,” he said. One example of that is Multiview feature. “Obviously it’s growing” as a staple of sports viewing in general, he added. But with “the number of concurrent NBA events we have, we really felt like it was important to bring that to fans and bring it in a way that is fan-centric.”
Having done “a lot of studies and research,” Couch went on, Prime Video’s Multiview will have “one game that’s larger than the others” within the frame, as opposed to the evenly divided grid that has come to define the feature across the industry. “We found that most fans tend to be mostly focused on one game and tracking others,” he added. “And so it’s easy to put one game bigger.”
Compared with NFL audiences, NBA fans approach games differently given the more expansive inventory. “We see a lot of short-form viewing, like just fourth-quarter viewing or catching up via highlights and those types of things,” Couch said. “And so a lot of our features lean into that, how do we make sure to bring fans content, even if they can’t watch the full game, and they’re watching it a day later?”
The global nature of Amazon’s rights deal also informed the product approach. Fans in many time zones will by definition be watching on demand rather than live. “There’s a lot of European players in the NBA right now,” Couch noted, “so we’re looking at, how can we serve a lot of those international fans as well?” Amazon has engineers based around the world, which helps them customize and localize the experiences in various countries, though the main product group is headquartered in the U.S.
In all, the first year of Prime Video’s 11-year deal with the NBA will feature 67 regular-season games, including a new Black Friday doubleheader. The streamer will also carry the knockout rounds of the Emirates NBA Cup (including the semifinals and finals), and also NBA games from Berlin and London in January. Prime Video will also present exclusive coverage of every postseason SoFi NBA Play-In Tournament game, first and second-round playoff games, and Conference Finals in six of the next 11 years.