TORONTO – The regional sports network had a good run. For four decades, cable subscribers in cities from Raleigh to Anaheim paid bundled monthly rates for home-team coverage they couldn’t find anywhere else, and NHL franchises collected rights fees on what felt like the stable side of the television business. That model is now collapsed, and this week, the league stopped pretending otherwise.
Amazon Prime Video announced September 2 that it will become the exclusive local streaming home for six NHL franchises: the Carolina Hurricanes, Anaheim Ducks, Columbus Blue Jackets, Dallas Stars, Minnesota Wild, and St. Louis Blues. The agreement begins with the 2026-27 season and runs multiple years. The announcement arrived five days before the season opens September 29, and roughly 24 hours before the league confirmed a 12-year deal granting Prime Video the rights to Wednesday Night Hockey in Canada, two first-round Stanley Cup Playoff series per year, and one second-round series annually through 2037-38.
Two announcements. One platform. One very clear direction.
In Canada, the arithmetic is simple. Starting September 30, when the New York Islanders visit the Toronto Maple Leafs at Scotiabank Arena, national Wednesday night broadcasts belong entirely to Prime Video, available in English and French at no additional cost to existing Prime members for at least 27 games per season. The 12-year term, negotiated through Rogers Communications, extends through a full generation of hockey, long enough that players currently in junior hockey will have retired before it expires.
The American arrangement is more complicated and, ultimately, more consequential.
The Anaheim Ducks and Dallas Stars are departing Victory+, the streaming service that entered sports rights with ambition and accumulated enough financial uncertainty this past year that both franchises wanted out. Prime Video is the landing point. The other four teams had already left the traditional regional sports network structure entirely. Carolina, Columbus, Minnesota, and St. Louis shifted into a league-centralized production arrangement that gave the NHL direct operational control over their in-market broadcasts, an interim arrangement that now ends. As Yahoo Sports reported, each club will announce its specific subscription packages and pricing ahead of the season, which means fans in all six markets are heading into opening night without knowing what they will pay.
That unresolved pricing is the deal’s most visible gap. When DAZN secured local streaming rights for the Knicks and Yankees this summer, the price question lingered for weeks after the announcement, frustrating subscribers who discovered they couldn’t simply add a sports channel. They had to evaluate an entirely new platform. The pattern is repeating. Charlie Neiman, Prime Video’s head of sports partnerships, positioned the deal as a natural deepening of an existing relationship. “We’re excited to build upon our strong relationship with the NHL and provide fans with more ways to connect with the local teams they love,” he said, without addressing the subscription mathematics fans will actually have to calculate before signing up.
David Proper, the NHL’s chief media officer, offered a different frame. “Fans want an easy way to find and follow their favorite teams,” Proper told the league’s official site, “and this agreement with Prime Video gives Clubs the flexibility to meet that demand as the market evolves.” The phrase “as the market evolves” is doing significant work. What it describes is a market that already evolved, past cable bundles, past regional sports networks, past Victory+, and landed somewhere that looks a lot like Amazon.
For the defending Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes, the stakes are specific. Carolina has spent the better part of the last five years building one of the NHL’s youngest and most engaged fanbases, drawing well in Raleigh on the strength of a team that plays aggressive, physical hockey and wins more often than not. Putting their in-market games on Prime Video either captures that fanbase seamlessly because much of it already has Amazon accounts, or discovers that “already paying for Prime” and “paying for Prime to watch hockey” are meaningfully different propositions. The Hurricanes are the highest-profile test case in this experiment.
St. Louis and Minnesota both enter the season with young cores and something to prove. The St. Louis Blues are led by a new captain after Robert Thomas took the armband following Brayden Schenn’s departure. The Anaheim Ducks, meanwhile, spent part of their summer navigating Cutter Gauthier’s training camp standoff before the forward reported to camp. Fans following both situations through a new streaming platform are the ones who will determine, through sign-up rates and engagement data, whether this kind of deal actually works at the local level.
Out-of-market fans retain access to all six clubs through NHL Center Ice, an important carve-out that protects the subscriber class that follows teams from outside their market footprints. The disruption is local by design.
Prime Video’s sports ambitions in the United States have grown steadily since it acquired Thursday Night Football from the NFL. Regional sports rights represent the most atomized piece of the American sports landscape: smaller audiences, market-by-market economics, and fans accustomed to coverage that once came bundled into a cable package at no apparent extra cost. DAZN’s expansion into regional sports streaming earlier this summer demonstrated how difficult it is to reassemble a fragmented local sports audience around a new subscription platform, even with marquee team names attached. Prime Video is betting its existing subscriber base and household penetration solve that problem differently. Six cities will find out whether that logic holds before the calendar reaches November.
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