The Japanese arm of the global Amazon-owned streaming service Prime Video has secured several baseball rights ahead of the upcoming 2025 Major League Baseball campaign.
Perhaps most prominently, the streaming service will begin the campaign by broadcasting the entirety of MLB’s season-opening Tokyo Series.
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That series will see the Chicago Cubs and the LA Dodgers of the MLB take on the Hanshin Tigers and the Yomiuri Giants of Japan’s NPB baseball league in exhibition games at the Japanese capital’s Tokyo Dome across March 15 and 16, before the two MLB sides face each other twice in regular season competition at the Tokyo Dome across March 18 and 19.
Prime Video will air all six of those fixtures directly, and in 2025 for the first time will also cover regular-season MLB games via its SPOTV channel, launched in collaboration with SPOTV Japan, a pan-Asian broadcaster that holds MLB rights across the region.
That element will see the SPOTV channel will showcase 54 live games per year, two per weekend, with a focus on the teams that feature Japanese players including the LA Dodgers (which have the likes of Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki), and the Chicago Cubs (which currently boast Seiya Suzuki and Shota Imanaga).
That channel will see the live streams available to Prime Video subscribers at no extra cost, and will also feature delayed game broadcasts, highlights packages, and ancillary content.
Prime Video Japan is already a carrier of MLB’s global direct-to-consumer service MLB.TV.
Speaking to Sportcal on the league’s rights strategy in Japan, MLB chief operations and strategy officer Chris Marinak said: “When you're with a partner of the scale of Amazon, it creates an opportunity to reach a [much wider] audience.
“They have a great product in Japan, they have a ton of reach, so I think anytime you can partner with a media partner who has reach throughout that particular country, that's the goal of what we're looking to do, from a media standpoint.”
The 2024 World Series-winning Dodgers, which boast the most high-profile player Shohei Ohtani, is of particular interest to the Japanese market and the team has already secured several major sponsorships in the country.
“Backstage Dodgers”, the Dodgers’ behind-the-scenes documentary series, will be exclusively distributed in Japan on Prime Vide0 through a partnership with the Dodgers’ local broadcaster Sportsnet LA.
In addition, Prime Video will also stream the Japanese national team’s upcoming exhibition series against the national team of the Netherlands, known as the Luxas Samurai Japan Series 2025 for sponsorship reasons.
The March 5 and March 6 fixtures will be played in anticipation of the MLB and Japanese domestic NPB seasons, as well as the upcoming 2026 World Baseball Classic international tournament, which Prime Video was the broadcaster for in 2023.
Prime Video Japan has also set up dedicated social media accounts for its sports business to attract more support.
Distribution of MLB’s media rights in Japan is handled by major rights agency Dentsu in an eight-year partnership agreed in 2021 that will run through the 2028 campaign and could reportedly be worth more than $60 million per year in what is baseball’s biggest non-US market.
