Why are Amazon and ION investing in the WNBA and NWSL? Because it’s smart business.

The landscape of women’s sports these days includes two companies that from afar seem pretty different.

Amazon is a super-modern conglomerate. It sells books, electronics, groceries, and everything else under the sun. It also runs the Prime Video streaming platform, with cachet worldwide.

ION is a broadcast television network, something more traditional — maybe even old-fashioned. Its corporate parent, Scripps, is known best among many people for running the National Spelling Bee. However, the network’s free-to-air channel (Channel 61 in Philadelphia) and online stream have new relevance as more people ditch cable and satellite TV.

It turns out they do have something in common: They’ve jumped headlong into broadcasting the WNBA and NWSL.

You might think that if two different companies make the same decision, they might have done it for a similar reason. And since most major business decisions start with the same reason — people in power think it will make money — you might wonder if Amazon and ION think the same way.

Indeed they do.

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Scripps’ push to get women’s sports leagues on ION started not long after the company bought the network in January 2021. ION didn’t have any sports at that point, but Scripps knew it had bought a big platform and could use women’s sports to raise its profile.

“We made a recommendation to the board that we shouldn’t go and chase the NFL or the NBA, but that our research had indicated that there is growing interest in women’s sports — not just soccer, and basketball, but softball, gymnastics, volleyball,” Scripps Sports president Brian Lawlor told The Inquirer. “But the biggest challenge facing women’s sports was that it’s really hard to be a women’s sports fan in America because there’s no consistency of where you can find the games.”

Now there is. Last year, ION started airing WNBA doubleheaders on Friday nights, and this year it started airing NWSL doubleheaders on Saturday nights.

“This didn’t happen by accident — it was 100% a strategy,” Lawlor said. “I think what we saw turned out to be right: that if you made the games visible, people would be interested in watching. And, obviously, there’s a lot of broadcasters now chasing women’s sports rights, but we’re certainly proud that we got in there before this explosion.”

Lawlor does not try to claim that ION sparked the explosion. ESPN has done the most with that, especially with its women’s basketball coverage, and CBS has added NWSL and WNBA coverage in recent years. But the bigger networks certainly have noticed what ION has done and know the rising tide lifts them all.

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“I’m not going to sit here and tell you that [we] anticipated women’s college basketball going from a million fans to 19 million fans … but we certainly could see that there was more interest,” Lawlor said. “And all it took was people being able to see the games, and then they realized how good they are, how good these athletes are, how competitive the games are, and people are getting engaged. So I think we got our moment right.”

Both nights of ION’s coverage include dedicated studio shows that started this year. That is another level of investment, not just in on-air talent (including Philly-area native Lisa Carlin hosting the NWSL show) but in storytelling about the players.

“I made the recommendation to our CEO that it was great to just run games, but we would create greater fandom if we could get people to understand the game more, understand the teams and the players,” Lawlor said, “and that’s going to require an element of storytelling that you can’t get when you just turn on, and a minute after, the game comes on.”

Along with that, he added, “we thought that we’d be able to get some sponsorships and some ad support.” That especially helps with soccer, where the clock runs continuously in each half and there are no commercial breaks during play.

“There are some brands that have been invested in women’s sports for a long time, and those brands got in early, and I think they’re benefiting from the moment,” Lawlor said. “But there’s a lot more brands now that are beginning to associate themselves [with] or express interest in women’s sports.”

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Prime Video also has its dedicated nights for coverage, Thursdays for the WNBA and Fridays for the NWSL. And though there’s no Philly team in either league yet, the outlet has a Philly-area native leading its coverage in Kennett Square-born Betsy Riley. The senior coordinating producer of live events also has a big role in Prime Video’s NFL coverage and its other sports properties.

“At Amazon, what we’re constantly looking for are ways to offer our fans and our customers more, and premium sports offerings fit that bill,” Riley said. “When you step back and look at our calendar year, and you look at how the NWSL and the WNBA fit into our sports programming, it’s a really nice fit for our fans and our customers. It gives our fans premium sports offerings pretty much year-round.”

Riley repeatedly used the word “premium” there. What does that mean to her, and how does anything that’s not the NFL measure up?

“We look at what people are interested in, watching, and following, and we really put the NWSL and the WNBA in that category,” she said. “We know there’s a really energetic, enthusiastic fan base for both of those sports.”

In part because of that, Riley wants her production to treat the leagues like any other.

“I don’t think there needs to be a distinction with ‘women’s’ in front of it,” she said. “Competition is what it’s about. It’s not a spectacle; it’s not a stunt.”

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Coincidentally, Riley helped hire two former players with Philly ties to be analysts on Prime Video’s NWSL broadcasts. Lianne Sanderson and Lori Lindsey played for the old Independence franchise, and Lindsey still lives here over a decade later.

Sanderson, however, lives in her native England, where she also does lots of TV and radio work. It isn’t cheap to fly someone over for broadcasts, but Riley believes it’s worth the money.

“When you’re talking about Lianne Sanderson, you’re speaking about an icon in the sport globally,” she said. “It’s really fun to go to training with Lianne. We call her our mayor — all the players come over and want to talk to her. … So was it a hard choice to bring incredible talent on board? No.”

Lindsey has also worked on CBS and ESPN’s NWSL coverage, Apple’s MLS coverage, and Fox’s women’s World Cup coverage. So she has seen a lot of the soccer media landscape and cares about the scale of Amazon’s investment.

“You can feel that growth, that desire to be involved and to showcase that in a way that maybe hasn’t been done before,” she said. “WNBA and NWSL, there’s cross-promotion, there’s excitement in terms of the drama.”

Some of that drama has gone to a cacophonous level, especially around Caitlin Clark. But there is no doubt that the mainstream media is paying attention to women’s sports now in a way that it never has.

“People are tuning into these basketball games, and they’re engaged in a further way than just what’s happening on the court,” Lindsey said. “Same with our league, where we’ve had that for a long time with the national team, but now I think you’re seeing that spread out to the NWSL with coverage [and] viewership.”

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