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Amazon Prime Joins Fight Game With Premier Boxing Champions PPV

Jason Clinkscales
·5 min read

Amazon’s ambitions in live sports could not have been made clearer when it bought the exclusive rights for Thursday Night Football in 2022. Over the years, Prime Video has also scored rights to top-flight soccer, cricket and basketball leagues in various global markets. Yet the streamer made an overlooked but significant multiyear rights agreement in late 2023 with Premier Boxing Champions, the boxing series created by longtime manager Al Haymon.

PBC found itself without a home when Paramount shut down Showtime Sports last fall. Along with HBO Sports’ 2018 decision to no longer produce boxing events after four decades, the Showtime shutdown left ESPN as the lone major linear network group to regularly feature the sport.

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Now, Haymon’s PBC will make its exclusive streaming debut this Saturday with a card headlined by Tim Tszyu taking on Sebastian Fundora in the main event for the WBC 154-pound title. Prime Video will host 10 to 12 fight cards each year, including the Prime-exclusive PBC Championship Boxing series that will feature many up-and-coming fighters. Non-subscribers to Prime will still have access to purchase the pay-per-view events and can watch some of the preliminary fights for free.

To boxing fans, Saturday is a proving ground for Prime Video, which will also share distribution of the Saul “Canelo” Alvarez/Jaime Munguia fight on May 4 with fellow streaming service DAZN and other pay-per-view providers.

PBC will produce the Saturday card, and at least with this first go-round, it will provide a familiar sight to fight fans with its broadcast team. On Monday, Prime Video revealed that team will feature blow-by-blow announcer Mauro Ranallo, host Brian Custer, analysts Abner Mares and Joe Goossen, and ringside reporters Claudia Trejos and Jordan Plant.

Allowing PBC to produce the event will not only provide a familiar feel on the screen but also frees Prime Video to focus on how the stream itself performs. “We defer to (PBC) as the experts having been in the space and produced a lot of marquee high quality boxing bouts in the past,” Charlie Neiman, Prime Video’s head of sports partnerships, said in a video call. “I do think for these first events … we really are focused on making sure accessibility, streaming quality, discovery—all of the things that really matter to a boxing fan being able to access the content—is front and center.”

For Amazon, getting into the fight game presents different circumstances than the company encounters with team sports, including one already evidenced with the main event.

When a quarterback is unable to play, it doesn’t mean that his team pulls out of its next game. Even though it’s hard for a network or streamer to bring the same level of promotional hype around the backup signal caller, the show must go on.

So when former welterweight champion Keith Thurman, who was originally set to take on Tszyu, pulled out of the fight on March 18 due to a training injury, PBC was able to quickly salvage the main event by replacing him with Fundora, who was originally on the undercard. Pullouts aren’t uncommon in boxing, and depending on the caliber of the fighter removed from a match, the public interest in the entire card can sink.

When asked how Prime Video will handle the occasional bad breaks in the boxing world, Neiman was confident that it can still feature the best possible fights. “The nice part about our relationship is, we have a lot of confidence in PBC’s stable of fighters, and we’re excited about the multiple fight slate we’re bringing to customers,” he said. “We want to bring them multiple fights over the course of the season, and then multiple fights over the multiyear deal.”

Boxing, or at least the fighters and promoters at the top of the food chain, remains partially reliant on the pay-per-view model. No streamer or league is immune to piracy, as shown by the UFC—another PPV-reliant combat sports organization—taking the lead in demanding a bigger fight from the government against streaming pirates.

Prime Video believes its wide availability could counter the need for fans to seek illegal streams. “With 200 million-plus Prime members around the world, where there’s not a screen we’re not on, we’re literally on billions of devices,” Neiman said. “From an access standpoint, we are excited about being able to bring in that pool of folks who might be interested in the fight.”

Having some of the preliminary fights in front of the paywall is also an attractant, he said.

All of this raises the question: Where does boxing on Prime Video fit in the famed Amazon flywheel? “(Prime Video is) a general entertainment service,” Neiman said. “And we’re focused on offering customers premium content year-round—the big fights, the championship fights, are marquee spectacles that have broad appeal to fans. We think it fits really nicely within the portfolio of big events, premium properties, live sports, as relates to Prime Video.”

Premier Boxing Champions may not bring the same attention to Prime Video that the NFL had with Thursday Night Football. However, boxing provides a chance for Prime to burnish its reputation as a premier sports destination beyond a few weeknights in the fall.

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