Amazon’s Interactive NBA Streaming Experience: A New Era of Basketball Viewing
As the 2025-26 NBA season approaches, Amazon is revolutionizing the way fans experience basketball with its new “NBA on Prime” offering. Starting October 24, viewers will have access to a suite of interactive features designed to personalize and enhance the basketball watching experience. This 11-year partnership marks a significant expansion of Amazon’s sports streaming portfolio, which already includes NFL’s “Thursday Night Football,” NASCAR, and Premier League soccer. The deal, reportedly worth $1.8 billion annually, gives Amazon exclusive streaming rights to 66 regular season games and select playoff matchups, representing another major step in the ongoing shift from traditional cable to streaming platforms for live sports content.
The centerpiece of Amazon’s NBA coverage is a set of innovative viewing technologies that put fans in control of their experience. Perhaps most notable is the personalized bet tracking feature developed in partnership with FanDuel. This opt-in experience allows viewers to link their Prime Video profile with their FanDuel account to display active NBA bets on-screen during games, with real-time updates on bet status and outcomes. While users can’t place bets directly through Prime Video, the platform’s “Odds View” feature provides a rotating feed of live betting information including moneylines, spreads, totals, player props, and more. This contextual overlay helps viewers understand how teams and players are performing relative to betting markets—a natural evolution of Amazon’s interactive sports viewing experience that began with its 2018 introduction of quarterly predictions for NFL games on Twitch.
Amazon’s customizable Multiview feature represents another significant advancement in sports streaming technology. Subscribers to both Prime Video and NBA League Pass can create a personalized viewing setup across most devices, selecting a primary game for the larger window while following other NBA matchups in smaller windows simultaneously. This multi-game viewing capability addresses a long-standing desire among basketball fans to follow multiple games during busy NBA nights without constant channel switching. The feature acknowledges the modern sports fan’s desire for comprehensive coverage and control over their viewing experience, allowing them to stay connected to all the action happening across the league in real-time.
Artificial intelligence plays a prominent role in Amazon’s NBA coverage through features like “Key Moments” and “Rapid Recap.” Key Moments uses AI to identify and curate the most exciting and pivotal plays throughout a game in real-time, allowing fans to access a growing collection of in-game highlights at any point, each with detailed descriptions. Whether it’s a spectacular dunk, a clutch three-pointer, or a game-changing defensive play, this feature ensures viewers never miss the most important action. Complementing this, Rapid Recap provides AI-curated highlight reels that bring fans up to speed on games in two minutes or less, offering condensed views of the most impactful moments before returning to live action. These AI-powered tools represent Amazon’s effort to accommodate viewers who may join broadcasts late or want quick access to the game’s defining moments.
Statistical information and analysis have become increasingly important to modern basketball fans, and Amazon has integrated comprehensive stats directly into the viewing experience. Viewers can access both traditional box score statistics and advanced metrics powered by AWS without leaving the live game broadcast. This seamless integration of data allows casual and hardcore fans alike to dive deeper into player and team performance metrics that enhance understanding and appreciation of the action. The inclusion of advanced statistics reflects basketball’s analytical revolution of the past decade and caters to viewers who have grown accustomed to data-driven insights as part of their sports consumption.
In a move that leverages Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, “NBA on Prime” also includes a “Shop the Game” feature that enables viewers to browse and purchase NBA merchandise without interrupting their viewing experience. Fans can either search “shop the game” in the Amazon Shopping app or use their remote’s “up” button while watching to reveal an interactive Shop tab that sends notifications to their mobile device. This integration of commerce and content represents Amazon’s unique ability to connect sports viewership with retail opportunities, potentially creating a new revenue stream while offering fans convenient access to team gear and memorabilia inspired by the action they’re watching. As cord-cutting continues and tech companies increasingly compete for valuable sports rights, Amazon’s approach with “NBA on Prime” showcases how streaming platforms can offer more personalized, interactive, and commercially integrated experiences than traditional broadcasts ever could.
