The NBA's contract with Amazon has a "Successor Technology" clause that allows for the possibility of new distribution models that could emerge during their 11-year contract, reports Puck. After the third year of the contract in 2028, Amazon has the option to adopt these innovations for NBA broadcasts's with the content of the league.
Given the potential advances in virtual or augmented reality, the NBA could potentially be incentivized to argue that those rights fall outside of the existing contract with Amazon. Or Amazon could decide to bundle Prime into a "new model" using new technologies.
According to Puck's analysis and reporting, "it feels like the parties settled on weak, ambiguous contractual language and decided this would be a 'tomorrow problem.'" Because of the potential for "competing interpretations [it] could easily be the crux of a future mega-dispute."
The NBA has gone through a similar somewhat unforeseen circumstance given the move from cable to streaming as they exited their TNT partnership for Amazon.