Amazon Prime Video will stream 21 New York Yankees games during the 2021 baseball season, with the first, featuring the Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays, slated to be held on April 18.
This marks the first season that will feature Yankees games on Amazon’s live-streaming service, which is free to subscribers of its Prime tier who live in the Yankees’ home-team footprint, which includes New York state, Connecticut, northeast Pennsylvania, and north and central New Jersey. The streams will be simulcasts of games produced by the regional-sports outlet YES that air on New York station WPIX and other broadcast partners for the Yankees games.
As part of its Yankees pact, Amazon will air a new 15-minute pre-game show on its service ahead of the first pitch, featuring a lineup of YES on-air talent. The pre-game show will preview the day’s game, highlight marquee match-ups and top players. Meanwhile, Prime subscribers in the Yankees home-team region can stream the games via Android, iOS mobile, and Fire TV, and gain access to live in-game stats, team and player details, and real-time play-by-play information.
Amazon has been part of the Yankees business since August of 2019, when it joined Amazon and Sinclair Broadcast Group to buy an 80% stake of YES from Walt Disney Co. in an arrangement that valued YES at $3.47 billion. Disney had to sell a passel of regional sports-focused cable networks previously owned by 21st Century Fox as part of a deal to acquire Fox’s cable and studio assets. The Yankees own 26% of YES. Sinclair owns 20% and Amazon owns 15%, with rights to acquire more. RedBird Capital, The Blackstone Group and Mubadala Capital are the other stakeholders in the outlet.
