As much of ad sales milestone as 2024 was for Amazon’s Prime Video, 2025 figures to be even bigger thanks to the addition of NBA and WNBA games to the slate.

“This is a pivotal year for us,” Danielle Carney, Amazon’s Head of US Video and Live Sports Sales, told Deadline in an interview. “We are transitioning from a single-sport upfront to a multi-sport upfront, so our conversations this year will not be focused on just one sport.”

Last year, which was the third of an 11-year exclusive deal with the NFL for Thursday Night Football, Prime Video also began putting ads on films and series for the first time. The tech giant hosted its first upfront presentation for advertisers, a splashy affair in New York last spring. With ratings momentum building for the NFL and more traction for originals, the company exceeded its internal projection of $1.8 billion in upfront ad revenue. (It doesn’t break out full-year video ad totals.)

The arrival of the NBA and WNBA this fall as an 11-year deal tips off will give Prime multiple nights of sports during the fall, plus top-tier live games in most of a given calendar year. In May and June, the platform will also carry five straight NASCAR Cup races. It also has rights to several dozen New York Yankees baseball games.

Carney said discussions with advertisers about the NBA have been very active, especially because the deal includes a studio show with enhanced sponsorship opportunities compared with the NFL. On Thursday nights, the streamer hosts a show from whatever stadium is hosting the game. Of course, advertisers have wanted in on the top draw in live TV, but when the NBA studio show is locked, the prominence of brands will be more controllable and consistent.

TNT’s gold-standard studio show, Inside the NBA, which is headed to ESPN in a licensing deal as Warner Bros. Discovery begins a new chapter without the NBA, heavily features Kia and other brands over the course of the 8-month season.

“Thursday Night Football was a bit of a wait-and-see situation because we had never done live sports at that scale before and we needed to secure the broadcast first before we leaned into the advertising aspect,” Carney said. Having proven itself with reliable technology and improving innovations on the production, product and ad-tech fronts, Prime Video has been able to hit the ground running since last summer’s news that Amazon had become the third rightsholder along with incumbent ESPN and returning partner NBCUniversal.

Carney said her teams are “close to moving” toward closing major deals for the studio show, but “these types of commitments take a little longer to finalize.”

With scripted series like Fallout, Reacher and The Lord of the Rings matched with popular films like You’re Cordially Invited and Red One, Carney said cross-pollination is becoming more frequent between live sports and entertainment. “It’s happening in both directions, where interest goes from entertainment to sports and then the other way,” she said.

The 40 new TNF advertisers last season represent buyers who could potentially be upsold to NBA games or shown opportunities with other programming, she said.

Unlike the NFL, she added, “having the NBA puts us in a really unique position in terms of owning a property globally,” putting advertisers like Emirates Air in play.

In a sit-down at NATPE in Miami last week, Prime Video international programming chief Kelly Day discussed the mosaic of local and tentpole programming and how it intersects with live sports. Although sports is an “irreplaceable” part of the lineup, she pushed back on perceptions it is taking away from budgets for other kinds of programming. A recent SEC filing from the company suggests as much, indicating that total 2024 spending on TV, movies and music increased 14% over 2023 levels, reaching $18.9 billion.

Technology, of course, is another key weapon in the Prime arsenal, Carney said. Interactive video ads, for example, have “no better place” to reap rewards for brands than on Prime Video. As it has stepped up its activities across video programming and advertising over the past few years, she said, it has been an increasing priority to help advertisers tap into Amazon’s deep well of first-party data.