Prime Video, the international OTT streaming service owned by e-commerce giant Amazon, has expanded its Major League Baseball (MLB) broadcast partnership in Japan with the SPOTV sports channel.
The SPOTV-branded channel hosted on the Prime Video platform will host over 350 live MLB games across the season at no extra cost to Prime Video customers.
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Additionally, Prime Video’s SPOTV channel will also offer one game per gameday throughout the playoffs, from the wildcard round through to the season-ending World Series.
Ancillary content and shoulder programming surrounding the league will also be provided.
The pair first partnered ahead of the 2025 campaign, with SPOTV broadcasting 54 live games, two per weekend, of Prime Video’s MLB rights slate, an agreement that has now been significantly expanded.
Yosuke Ishibashi, director and head of content at Prime Video Japan, commented: “We have been delivering the excitement of baseball to Prime members, including last year's intense MLB regular season battles, and have received excellent feedback."
"With many Japanese players joining MLB this season and following the fierce battles in international competitions, customer attention on MLB has grown more than ever. In response to customer needs, we will stream over 350 games during the regular season on the SPOTV Channel, significantly exceeding last year, delivering the excitement of outstanding plays.
“ Furthermore, through our multi-year contract with SPOTV, we will continue to bring MLB's intense battles to Prime members for the long term. Please join us in cheering for the world's highest level of competition on the SPOTV Channel.”
This new agreement will begin on March 27, with the SPOTV channel to stream coverage of Munetaka Murakami’s likely Chicago White Sox debut against the Milwaukee Brewers, before the Los Angeles Dodgers (home of Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki) host the Arizona Diamondbacks later that same day.
The back-to-back World Series-winning Dodgers, which boast high-profile Japanese players Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, are of particular interest to the Japanese market, and the team has already secured several major sponsorships in the country.
There are now as many as 16 Japanese Players in MLB, including the aforementioned newcomer Murakami and the iconic Dodgers trio.
Other notable names include Chicago Cubs pair Seiya Suzuki and Shota Imanaga, Toronto Blue Jays newcomer Kazuma Okamoto, New York Mets pitcher Kodai Senga, and San Diego Padres duo Yuki Matsui and Yu Darvish (although Darvish is sidelined for the 2026 season).
Speaking to Sportcal on the league’s rights strategy in Japan back in early 2025, 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.”
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.
