Amazon & ESPN's Sports Streaming Collision Course

It isn't complicated. Why are all these streaming services increasingly moving into live sports? Sutton's law: because that's where the money is. Specifically, the advertising dollars. And more specifically because these are now the only events that engender live, communal viewing. This past week's Super Bowl is the ultimate reminder of this, but smaller sporting events in aggregate matter too.

At first, the problem with sports streaming was that the audience didn't know where to find the content. This is a major problem across all of streaming – and seemingly getting worse – but it's especially acute with sports because again, it's live. ESPN has smartly been trying to alleviate this with a TV Guide-like offering (while at the same time, Disney keeps making it more complicated) that helps entrench them as a hub. Amazon has taken a more expensive (but necessary) approach to catch up to ESPN as a destination: buying up rights to different sports. Increasingly, if you're looking for a game on streaming, you know that Prime Video is one of the destinations to check...