Amazon Prime Video is getting into the wrestling business with new AEW deal

All Elite Wrestling and Amazon’s Prime Video today announced a multi-year deal that will see the streaming service carry AEW’s pay-per-view events in the US, Canada, and the UK. Their partnership will start this coming weekend with AEW Revolution, which airs Sunday night.

Unlike Thursday Night Football and other sports content that comes included with a Prime subscription, you’ll still very much have to pay for each individual AEW event. (Revolution costs $49.99, if you were wondering.) This simply just gives fans another avenue for where to watch.

For AEW, the pact represents a branching out from the wrestling company’s longtime alliance with Warner Bros. Discovery. Earlier this year, WBD’s Max service began simulcasting AEW’s weekly shows Dynamite and Collision at the same time that they air on cable. Max is also now home to the vault of AEW’s past pay-per-view events, and WBD has said it’s still developing the infrastructure to offer them live.

AEW has so far refrained from allowing any streamer to offer its live, marquee events as part of a base monthly subscription. That differs substantially from WWE’s strategy, where so long as you’ve got any tier of Peacock, you can watch premium live events like WrestleMania as they happen at no extra cost. WWE also brought its flagship weekly program, Raw, to Netflix in January with much fanfare after the show spent decades as a staple of cable TV.

By contrast, AEW has streamed its pay-per-views through a hodgepodge of services including Bleacher Report, TrillerTV, YouTube, and now Prime Video in addition to traditional cable and satellite providers. Having them all on Max after the fact is convenient, but if you want to catch AEW’s biggest shows live, you’ve still got to pay for each one — at least for now.