US cable TV heavyweight DirecTV has expanded its sports offering with a pair of new rights carriage deals across soccer and motorsports.
Courtesy of a new deal with e-commerce giant Amazon’s Prime Video OTT streaming service, DirecTV’s out-of-home business broadcast platform will air the streamer’s slate of live broadcasts from US stock car racing’s Nascar.
Go deeper with GlobalData
The addition of Prime Video’s five-race package means that DirecTV for Business, which boasts over 300,000 commercial premises as customers, will carry every Nascar race through the remainder of the 2025 campaign, the only commercial broadcast service to do so.
The deal will begin with the June 2 Nascar Cup Series race at Nashville, known as the Cracker Barrel 400, and will be followed by the Firekeepers Casino 400 (June 8), Nascar’s debut race in Mexico at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez (June 15), and the Nascar Cup Series Race at Pocono Raceway (June 22).
The recent Coca-Cola 600, Nascar’s Prime Video debut, averaged 2.72 million viewers and was the third-highest race broadcast of the season among those not aired by major media giant Fox, with which Prime Video splits the rights.
DirecTV has also tied up with Major League Soccer (MLS), the US’ elite competition, to offer its Sunday Night Soccer broadcast slate free to DirecTV customers.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataIn conjunction with the MLS’s 30th anniversary season, both residential and commercial DirecTV customers will have free access to the slate of Sunday night fixtures throughout the 2025 season.
This expands DirecTV For Business’ current exclusive deal with MLS, through which it carries the MLS Season Pass broadcast service for commercial premises, while the DirecTV residential offering also carries the service on a non-exclusive basis.
DirecTV already sponsors the San Diego FC franchise, the league's newest expansion team, which will debut in the 2025 campaign.
As the official jersey partner, DirecTV branding will appear on the front of all home and away SDFC jerseys, which will be manufactured by Adidas, throughout the season.
As a “chrome club” tier sponsor of SDFC, DirecTV gains exclusive sponsorship inventory including interior and exterior branding at the club’s 35,000-capacity Snapdragon Stadium, including in TV-visible areas, likely on pitch-side hoardings.
MLS media rights are held globally by tech firm Apple, and disseminated on its Apple TV OTT service, as part of a major 10-year, $2.5 billion media rights deal, one that league commissioner Don Garber back in October said could be "one of the greatest in sports history."
