Amazon reportedly axing Sports Talk lineup in October

Amazon is reportedly planning on canceling its 12-hour Sports Talk block on Prime Video.

Per Richard Deitsch at The Athletic, the weekday lineup will end at the end of October.

Amazon Prime Video's “Sports Talk" bloc, which was announced last year as a daily 12-hour programming block of studio shows, will end at the end of October. The company declined comment. The media business is brutal. Wishing the best for those talent creators.

— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) September 28, 2023

The block of shows, running from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday-Friday, launched last November.

The lineup for Sports Talk featured shows hosted by Cari Champion, Rennae Stubbs, and Master Tesfatsion, among others. However, the shows didn’t contain sports highlights, two of the 12 daily hours were a replay of the show that immediately preceded it, and the final two hours of the day were mostly dedicated to recapping earlier shows.

There’s just so much competition in the sports talk radio space, between local shows, national shows, and even debate shows on television networks. Throw in the hundreds of other FAST (free, ad-supported television) channels available on Prime Video and Amazon’s Sports Talk shows were swimming upstream from the word go.

For the talent involved with the Sports Talk block, the impending cancelation is a disappointing turn of events. But it does seem like Amazon never gave the Sports Talk lineup the promotion and dedication it needed to succeed long-term, and the company will have to go back to the drawing board if it wants to create more original sports content.

Amazon’s sports docuseries and documentary content, most notably the All or Nothing series, has been quite well-received. Maybe that’s where the company should dedicate its sports focus outside of live events.