The NHL has signed a multiyear carriage agreement with Charter Communications Spectrum covering linear distribution for four centrally produced clubs, and will place the local games of six teams on Amazon Prime Video. The Carolina Hurricanes, Columbus Blue Jackets, Minnesota Wild and St. Louis Blues will be carried on Spectrum while each retains an over-the-air presence, and their games will also stream on Prime Video as a standalone subscription at $20 per month or $100 per year with a free Amazon account. The Anaheim Ducks and Dallas Stars go further: their local games require a paid Amazon Prime membership. No financial terms were disclosed. The league had initially planned to place three clubs on Prime Video and expanded the group to six.
The arrangement is a direct consequence of the regional sports network collapse. As RSN operators defaulted or renegotiated downward, the NHL took production in-house for a group of clubs and has been assembling replacement distribution ever since. David Proper, the leagues executive vice president for media and international strategy, described the Prime Video element as critical to complementing linear efforts and said the league remains in conversations with everybody one would expect. The parallel market provides the price context: the Detroit Pistons became the eleventh NBA club to join DAZN this offseason at $20 per month or $120 per year, against a reported minimum guarantee in the $1m to $2m range annually.
The two-tier structure inside a single league is the notable design choice. Four clubs get maximum reach, pairing cable carriage and over-the-air broadcast with a cheap standalone stream that requires no Amazon relationship. Two clubs sit entirely behind a general-entertainment membership, meaning a household in Dallas or Anaheim must subscribe to Prime to watch its local team. That is the first meaningful test in North American professional sport of whether in-market games can live behind a non-sports subscription without eroding the audience base that local sponsorship rates, ticket pricing and regional partner value all depend on. The league has hedged by running both models simultaneously, which produces a controlled comparison it can use in the next negotiating cycle.
The economics favour the league in the near term and remain unproven in the long term. Guaranteed fees from Charter and Amazon replace RSN revenue that was either shrinking or gone, and the standalone streaming tier creates a direct subscriber relationship the NHL has never held at the local level. The risk is reach. Regional cable at its peak put local games in front of nearly every pay-television household in a market; a paid Prime membership or a $20 monthly add-on does not, and audience contraction at local level eventually reprices everything sold against it.
For the industry, the NHL is now the clearest live experiment in post-RSN local distribution, with Amazon buying league-adjacent inventory at low cost while MLB builds its own production and distribution stack and DAZN aggregates NBA and NHL clubs. Whichever structure holds its audience will set the model the remaining North American clubs adopt.
