Prime Video’s Michigan-Duke broadcast still not fully settled: ‘We’re working through it’
Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images Duke’s recent announcement that three games, including its Dec. 21 tilt against Michigan at Madison Square Garden, will be broadcast on Amazon’s Prime Video does not appear to be as rock-solid as it was initially presented. In April, the school announced a landmark agreement with Prime Video, giving the streaming service broadcast rights for three Duke neutral-site games.
Those games included a Nov. 25 meeting with UConn in Las Vegas, a Dec. 21 matchup with Michigan in New York, and a Feb.
20 contest with Gonzaga in Detroit. Not long after, however, Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports reported that the Big Ten believes it controls the rights to sell the Duke-Michigan game as part of a deal with the ACC to alternate control of media rights for neutral-site games played in “shared territory,” including New York City. When Michigan and Duke met last year in Washington, D.
C. , the Blue Devils were designated the home team, which meant ESPN held the broadcast rights as part of the ACC’s media rights package (That was ESPN’s most-watched college basketball game in seven years ). It was presumed then that the Big Ten would control the rights to this year’s matchup.
The Big Ten’s primary rights holder is Fox Sports (which sublicenses games to partners such as NBC and CBS), and it is reportedly involved in this dispute. Adding further complexity to the situation is the revelation that ESPN was involved in the Amazon negotiations , but neither the Big Ten nor Fox was. An IP lawyer who examined the Big Ten’s claim was skeptical , pointing out that Fox’s contractual relationship runs through ESPN and the ACC, not Duke or Amazon.