Amazon's Prime Video is airing the NBA's play-in tournament for the first time, and basketball fans were enraged by a technical glitch at a key, high-stakes moment.
The disruption occurred during overtime of the Miami Heat-Charlotte Hornets game Tuesday, prompting LeBron James (@KingJames) to ask X users whether the stream had indeed failed.
On X, RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) — a companion account for a subreddit devoted to college football — shared a clip of the interrupted stream along with pointed commentary.
When Amazon buys rights to your favorite conference's games, just remember that they paid $20B for NBA broadcast rights and this is what they aired in the final minute of a single possession overtime postseason game. https://t.co/Hoi9zzlnNK
— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) April 15, 2026
"When Amazon buys rights to your favorite conference's games, just remember that they paid $20B for NBA broadcast rights and this is what they aired in the final minute of a single possession overtime postseason game," the post read.
In 2024, Prime Video and the NBA inked an 11-year streaming deal that granted the company exclusive rights to air events such as the NBA Cup and play-in tournament games, including the Heat-Hornets tilt at Spectrum Center.
According to Sports Illustrated, viewers were chagrined, particularly because LaMelo Ball gave Charlotte a five-point lead while the stream was down.
As Sportico noted, Prime Video's NBA broadcast glitch was poorly timed, coinciding with growing frustration among fans as streaming companies increasingly lock down the rights to their favorite teams' games.
A spokesperson for Prime Video attributed the overtime broadcasting failure to a "temporary disruption due to a hardware failure in our production truck," promising a "thorough internal review to determine the cause of the outage."
Several commenters on X critiqued the viewing experience on Prime Video, positing that companies were looking for opportunities to squeeze more revenue from sports fans.
"Got to subscribe to the Overtime package ($60/mo) that's no longer bundled with regulation time," one joked.
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Save $1,000 this year 💸 "Needed to subscribe and pay for the two-day fast shipping in order to watch these two minutes lol," another replied.
"They just want the traffic. They don't care about the actual sport," a third griped.
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