Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images
By Matt Yoder on

The conventional wisdom is that moving sporting events to streaming sacrifices audience reach for giant tech dollars. Amazon Prime Video is trying to prove that is not the case.

Prime Video is in the first year of their massive new rights deal with the NBA. And as far as the streaming competition goes, they have built by far the biggest portfolio of live sports rights including their deals with the NFL for Thursday Night Football, the WNBA, and a NASCAR midseason package.

And as the data has come in for the first set of NBA play-in games this week, the numbers are looking good according to Amazon.

The tech giant shared that Wednesday’s Warriors-Clippers 9-10 play-in game reached an average of 3.15 million viewers, the most watched Amazon NBA game to date.

In total, the first two nights of NBA play-in action on Amazon scored a 12% increase over comparable coverage on ESPN and TNT last year according to Sports Media Watch. It’s worth noting that this year’s numbers are likely helped by the new Nielsen Big Data measurement system, which has seen plenty of sporting events see ratings increases in the past year.

However, even with that caveat, a 12% increase in viewership from one year to the next on streaming should please the NBA and Amazon. With much of the sports media world looking at the NBA and believing that the sky is somehow falling for the league with crises around player injuries and tanking, the data tells a very different story.

Regular-season viewership was up 16% for the NBA this year compared to last year. But even if you want to attribute that growth to increased broadcast exposure on NBC and Big Data measurements, these year-over-year increases on streaming for play-in games combat the narrative that the association is somehow headed in the wrong direction. And armed with a huge rights deal, broadcast exposure, and positive streaming numbers, maybe the NBA is doing just fine.

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