The Yankees will be coming to Amazon Prime customers located within the extended New York viewing market this upcoming season after the online behemoth bought a partial ownership stake in the team’s network last summer.
A total of 21 games, including marquee showdowns with the rival Boston Red Sox and now villainous Houston Astros, will be available to Prime customers in New York, northeast Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and parts of central and northern New Jersey. The first stream will be on April 17 when the Yankees host a 7:05 p.m. start against the Cincinnati Reds.
Non-Amazon Prime customers need not worry about missing any action as the deal isn’t exclusive, meaning games will still be available on television.
While Amazon’s deal to stream Yankees games marks its first venture into local sports streaming, it is not the company’s first live sports deal. It reached an agreement with the NFL prior to the 2017 season to stream Thursday Night Football games and re-upped on that deal with a two-year extension in April 2018.
Amazon vice president of global sports video Maria Donoghue notes there will be some notable differences between the approaches to the two streams, per this article from Bloomberg:
Unlike Amazon’s broadcasts of Thursday-night NFL games, its Yankees streams won’t include a commerce tab to let fans buy the team’s gear on the Amazon e-commerce site. Donoghue said there are no plans to facilitate sports betting during the Yankees broadcasts.
Of course, New York online sports betting is not yet legal, so there’s no way to bet on, say, Yankees World Series odds on Amazon and plans to leave out sports betting elements make sense. If and when it does go live, however, those plans could quickly change.
Streaming sports and sports wagering is a natural pairing, one that is already starting to form elsewhere. As legal online sports betting continues its rapid growth, consumer appetite to simultaneously watch and wager will only continue to grow with it. Thus, the fusion of sports betting data, live steams, and the ability to place both pregame and live in-game wagers feels inevitable.
This isn’t a wild hypothesis, nor is it one without foundation. It was announced on Monday that FanDuel Sportsbook has a partnership in place that will allow the popular online sportsbook app to stream daily up to two NHL games. In order to view the streams, users must have an actively funded account or have wagers on those specific contests.
While in most cases, current sports bettors pair mobile wagering apps with a television viewing experience or with third-party mobile gamecast updates, a live stream—one loaded with pertinent betting data (and eventually the on-screen ability to place live bets)—would create the ultimate betting experience. Unless, of course, they prefer bad animations and refreshing a delayed (and often stalled) text-based feed that is absent of context to follow bets.
Stay tuned.
