As regional sports networks collapse, Amazon’s multiyear NHL streaming deal offers a new model for local broadcasts and tests what fans are willing to pay directly for their favorite teams.
For decades, local sports TV leaned on an odd feature of the cable bundle. If you paid for cable, you probably helped pay for your local team’s games, even if you never watched a game of hockey. Regional sports networks (RSNs) paid teams for local rights and charged distributors for each subscriber who received the channel. The checks stayed steady while households kept paying.
As cord-cutting accelerated, those economics weakened. Some rights payments shrank, arrived late, or stopped altogether. Charlie Neiman, the head of sports partnerships at Prime Video, now has a different address to offer hockey teams. On Sept. 2, Prime Video and the NHL announced a multiyear agreement making Amazon’s service the exclusive local streaming home for the Carolina Hurricanes, Anaheim Ducks, Columbus Blue Jackets, Dallas Stars, Minnesota Wild and St. Louis Blues.
The teams reached Amazon through two breakdowns. Carolina, Columbus, Minnesota and St. Louis had relied on Main Street Sports Group, operator of FanDuel Sports Network, before it wound down after missing 2026 rights payments. Dallas and Anaheim came from Victory+, the free streaming service that collapsed at the end of August. The four former Main Street clubs will charge $19.99 a month or $99.99 a year on Prime Video. Carolina, Columbus and Minnesota say a paid Prime membership is not required, while St. Louis says its subscription is available to all Amazon customers. Dallas and Anaheim have no separate fee for eligible Prime members.
Six Teams Are Using Prime in Two Different Ways
Anaheim is the easiest place to see the setup. Prime Video will carry 77 Ducks regular-season games, and 65 will also air free on local TV, with 61 on FOX Los Angeles+ and four on KTTV FOX 11. For those 65 games, a fan can use an app or an antenna (a small sign that streaming has not quite finished off the rabbit ears). One local product can now live inside more than one distribution system.
Carolina shows the paid version. The defending Stanley Cup champions own and operate the Hurricanes Hockey Network, which oversees production, distribution, sales, and marketing with the NHL. Fans can buy it through Prime Video without paying for Prime itself. Columbus and Minnesota are also keeping cable, satellite, and selected over-the-air options besides Prime. Amazon’s job in those markets stops at the stream. The flexibility makes more sense once you see what these clubs are replacing.
The RSN Collapse Left Teams Looking for Another Model
In May 2019, Sinclair agreed to buy 21 regional sports networks from Disney at an enterprise value of $10.6 billion. The portfolio carried local rights to 42 MLB, NBA and NHL teams, and Diamond Sports Group was expected to incur $8.2 billion of debt to help fund the purchase. Seven years later, several NHL clubs are rebuilding local distribution themselves.
Diamond depended heavily on cable. Before its March 2023 bankruptcy filing, more than 80% of its revenue came from traditional TV distribution, Reuters reported. A restructuring later cut its debt from nearly $9 billion to about $200 million and rebranded the networks as FanDuel Sports Network.
The new name, however, did not fix the old math. Main Street Sports Group, Diamond’s successor, said it would wind down after the first round of the NHL playoffs. Sports Business Journal reported that it had not made a single 2026 rights-fee payment to any of its 13 NBA and seven NHL partners. Carolina, Columbus, Minnesota and St. Louis were four of them. The cable problem had reached the teams’ accounts.
Dallas shows why moving games online does not automatically solve the business problem. The Stars left Bally Sports in 2024 for a seven-year agreement with Victory+, a free, ad-supported streaming service in which the team held an ownership interest. Two years later, Victory+ shut down, and its parent company entered receivership in Canada. Stars president and CEO Brad Alberts said the club had not received 98% of what it was owed over the previous year and had lost money in the “double-digit millions.”
You do not need a media-finance model to feel that shortfall. Receiving roughly two cents of every dollar owed leaves a hole even a wealthy sports organization has to notice. “We did everything we could to save them,” Alberts said, while blaming “financial mismanagement.”
Victory+ made Stars games free to watch, but access could not protect Dallas when the company behind the stream could not meet its obligations.
The NHL had been preparing for another problem: who would make the broadcasts after regional networks disappeared. On July 21, NHL Productions said it would provide centralized production for Carolina, Columbus, Minnesota and St. Louis, including game production, graphics, replay and technical support. Anaheim later joined. The old RSN could handle nearly every part of the process. The new structure lets those jobs sit with different organizations.
“Fans want an easy way to find and follow their favorite teams,” NHL chief media officer and senior executive vice president David Proper said when the Prime agreement was announced. He said the deal gives clubs “the flexibility to meet that demand as the market evolves.” Some fans now pay for a team channel. Others get games with Prime. Local television remains in several markets, while the NHL handles more production.
Amazon Can Treat Local Sports Differently
With production moving elsewhere, Amazon does not have to rebuild the regional network it is helping replace. Its value begins with distribution. “We have firmly established Prime Video as a primary destination for sports,” Neiman said in the Sept. 2 announcement. He joined Amazon in 2016, when the company had not streamed a live event. The Seattle Kraken became an early local test in 2024, putting non-national games on Prime Video while keeping free over-the-air television.
Amazon says Prime Video reaches more than 315 million ad-supported viewers worldwide each month, based on its internal data. Ampere Analysis projects Prime Video will lead streamers in sports-rights spending this year at about $3.8 billion, or 27% of the global total.
A Hurricanes game does not need a worldwide audience to be useful inside a worldwide platform. Prime can serve Carolina through the same app, billing system, and advertising operation it uses elsewhere. A new regional streamer has to persuade fans to find another service and trust that it will still be there two seasons later.
Amazon also has businesses surrounding the viewer that a traditional regional sports channel did not. It sells subscriptions and advertising, and 88% of U.S. Prime Video households have shopped on Amazon, according to Amazon Ads (so the paper-towels example is not as silly as it sounds). Amazon says its ad tools draw on trillions of first-party streaming, shopping, and browsing signals. In 2024, Neiman told GeekWire, “You’re no longer beholden to a one-to-many message.” While explaining audience-based advertising.
Still, Amazon and the NHL have not disclosed the financial terms, so there is no way to know whether these agreements can replace the rights money clubs collected in the strongest RSN years. Anaheim has guaranteed its no-extra-charge Prime setup only for the first year. In Carolina, Columbus, Minnesota and St. Louis, fans pay the $19.99 team fee even if they are Prime members. Six clubs are using one distributor while testing how much local viewers will pay directly for one team’s games outside the old cable bundle.
Dallas fans went from a free streaming service to needing a paid Prime or Prime Video membership within days. Alberts, whose club has changed local streaming homes twice in two years, told reporters he expects Prime Video to carry Stars games for the next two to four years. Then he added, “God help me if we have to change this again any time sooner.”
