The Graeme Roustan Show: Magda Grace

The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 hockey business annual is available at THN.com/free, featuring the annual 100 people of power and influence list.

W. Graeme Roustan, owner and publisher of The Hockey News, sat down with special guests for peer-to-peer conversations also featured in the issue, including the head of Prime Video, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Magda Grace.

Here's their full conversation in The Graeme Roustan Show:

Read along with an excerpt from their discussion:

W. GRAEME ROUSTAN: You’re a big hockey fan. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and where you came from?

MAGDA GRACE: I’m from Montreal originally. I grew up in Montreal and lived there for quite a few years. I went to the University of Toronto for undergrad and did McGill Law as my background. I also spent some time in Los Angeles, New York and Seattle. I’ve been back in Toronto and Canada for the last few years. It’s been great.

WGR: Can you talk a little bit about how this relationship with Amazon Prime Video and the NHL came to be?

MG: We’ve been working with the NHL for quite some time. In Canada, back in 2019-20, we really started going local and understanding that in order to be a successful global business, we needed to be successful locally first. We said, “Hey, we need to make some local originals. We need to make content that resonates with our customers in Canada.”

The first local original that we green-lit at that time was All or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs with Steve Mayer and NHL Productions. That was back in 2020 when we kicked that off. We’ve been working with the NHL for over four years now through a variety of different productions. We’ve also done a few documentaries with them as well. This has been an ongoing relationship for us, and we’re really pleased to bring live sports to it as well.

WGR: Was hockey a perfect fit for Amazon in Canada?

MG: For us, I think everything starts with Prime. We constantly ask ourselves, “How do we make Prime better? How do we continue to make this one of the best, if not the best, membership programs in the world?” I think sports, as a part of that, is irreplaceable, and certainly hockey in Canada is the No. 1 sport for us. It was definitely a no-brainer for us to be looking at acquiring sports rights for Canadian audiences. Working backwards from the customer was a critical piece of that, and ensuring that we were serving those audiences, making Prime even better, was really the reason why.

WGR: Prime Video was producing shows and content, but you’re also now producing games on Monday nights. Is it a natural progression or extension of what you were doing for the past three or four years?

MG: I think we’ve seen that Tier-1-sport properties is an area that we think we can be successful in, have a new point of view and raise the bar in terms of production, innovation and technology. We’ve seen that with Thursday Night Football out of the U.S. I think our appetite and ambition to scale Tier 1 sports globally is definitely part of the reason why we came and did the deal with the NHL and Rogers, but absolutely, we wanted to produce Prime Monday Night Hockey end-to-end. It’s done by our production team from Amazon, in addition to local Canadian producers. Really raising the bar and delivering the best-in-class production from Day 1 was an absolute priority for us.

WGR: It seems like there are outside-of-traditional media enterprises like Netflix, Amazon and Google that are all looking at sports and trying to get into sports broadcasting and media. What is that connection?

MG: I think it’s working backwards from our customers and seeing that sports really resonates with those audiences. It really is irreplaceable for us having live sports. We do carry sports properties through our Prime Video Channels business, which are add-on subscriptions. We do carry Sportsnet, TSN, DAZN, and a bunch of sports channels that we make available to our Prime membership. We see a lot of demand for that, and in our aspirations to be the world’s best streaming service and to be a premium entertainment hub for all of our customers, Tier-1 sports was a missing piece for us in Canada. This is helping us on that journey and that next step in our progression as a business and for continuing to deliver for our customers.

WGR: What is your appetite for 2026?

MG: We just started with our live games a couple of months ago. Getting that right for our fans and our audiences is our No. 1 priority. It’s too early to really talk about the 2026 rights coming up, but I do think that we see Tier-1 sports in general, in Canada and globally, as a priority for us as a business.

WGR: When you were sitting down talking with the NHL, and I’m sure you’ve talked to different team owners, what does Amazon say about how it can bring your Prime customers to become hockey fans in the bigger picture?

MG: We have quite a large presence in Canada. We have millions of customers, and we firmly believe that bringing the NHL and live hockey to our Prime membership would help grow the audience for the sport.

We’re in more households than paid TV. That’s a real opportunity for more audiences to discover hockey. So far, we’ve been very pleased with the results for Prime Monday Night Hockey. We’re seeing a really strong engagement, particularly with younger audiences, which I think is very appealing to everyone who’s involved in making the NHL successful in Canada. I think it’s important to grow those audiences. We know we can play a big part in it by diversifying the types of devices that we’re making the content available on and by bringing it to different types of households. We’re starting to see that now, and we’re really pleased with the result.

WGR: What’s your viewpoint on women’s hockey as well as women’s sports in general in Canada and the relationship between Amazon and women’s sports?

MG: We were really pleased this year to announce a broadcast partnership with the PWHL. We’ll have one night a week through the season and also, for the first time, have French-language rights for the Montreal Victoire as well. I think watching that sport, watching that league specifically, we’re really proud of how quickly it was able to ramp up. I think that there’s a really bright future for the league, so it was natural for us to be able to support, grow the audience for the league and make it available to even more customers. In general, I think Amazon Prime Video has been very supportive of women’s sports. In Canada, we have the National Women’s Soccer League as well and we had the final game of Christine Sinclair.

WGR: Can you talk a bit about Amazon, streaming and the relationship with the NHL in the United States?

MG: I don’t oversee the U.S. business, so I don’t have too much to share there, but our relationship with the NHL is a global relationship. For all of our unscripted series, we’ve launched those in the U.S. as well. All or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs was available in over 200 countries worldwide, and Faceoff, which we are pleased to announce will be renewed for a second season, is a big priority for the U.S. team as well. I do think that the love of hockey is not limited to Canada. I think people overall are really excited about our NHL partnership, and that extends outside of Canada as well.

For this and more interviews with a deep look into the world of the hockey business, check out The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 issue, available at THN.com/free.