CHARLOTTE, N.C. — NASCAR announced historic media rights deals on Wednesday.
Starting in 2025, five Cup Series races will be exclusively streamed on Amazon Prime Video. The bulk of races will continue airing on Fox and NBC networks, while TNT Sports will also broadcast five races.
“We want to meet race fans where they are,” NASCAR president Steve Phelps said in a press conference inside the Music City Center. “We are super excited about what 2025 is going to bring to us, because we are the distribution that we now have across here, which is obviously a combination of broadcast, cable and streaming.”
Fox Sports and NBC Sports will each carry 14 races in the 38-race season. The other 10 — in the middle of the season, with Fox continuing to broadcast the Daytona 500 and beginning while NBC has the playoffs — will be split between new partners Amazon and Warner Bros.
In addition to the five races it broadcasts, Prime Video will stream practice and qualifying for most races during the first half of the season. After TNT Sports begins its coverage with the next five midseason races, which will also stream on the B/R Sports Add-On on Max, it will stream practice and qualifying for the remainder of the season on Max and broadcast it on TruTV.
Financial terms of the agreements were not disclosed, but Sports Business Journal reported that the seven-year deals will generate $7.7 billion.
“Working with them for a long period of time, there’s going to be a certain amount of innovation,” NBC Sports President Rick Cordella said at the press conference. “Over the last 10 years, stage racing, tweaks to the playoffs — all of that really plays into why we want to be partners with NASCAR. And then you look at the product itself. It’s exciting racing, a young crop of drivers hitting the circuit.”
NASCAR’s current 10-year deals with Fox and NBC, which generated a record $8.2 billion, are set to expire after the 2024 season. These new deals will take NASCAR through 2031.
While Cup Series races airing exclusively on a streaming platform is a first for NASCAR, it follows trends by other professional and collegiate sports leagues. The NFL solely streams Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, MLB puts select Friday night games on Apple TV Plus, the Big Ten has been airing certain football games on Peacock, among others.
“We look at this as a seven-year-plus partnership,” Jay Marine, Prime Video’s vice president and global head of sports, said at the press conference. “That’s how we want to invest — so we can innovate for the long-term.”