Amazon published its August 2026 Prime Video schedule on July 31, 2026, listing five original premieres, roughly 60 licensed catalogue additions and 19 live sporting events across four properties. The calendar arrived one day after the company reported second-quarter advertising services revenue of 19.8 billion dollars, up 26% year over year, with executives attributing part of that growth to sold-out inventory in live sport.

The schedule itself is a consumer document. Written by Tyler Greenawalt and published on Amazon's corporate news site, it makes no reference to ad load, commercial terms or inventory availability. For media buyers, however, the monthly calendar has become one of the few public, forward-looking descriptions of what Prime Video will actually put in front of an audience that Amazon last sized at 315 million ad-supported viewers globally.

August's edition is dense in one specific way. It carries more live events than the July schedule did, and the live events cluster on Thursdays.

Five originals across a 21-day window

The headline title is Reacher, returning for a fourth season on August 12. According to Amazon, the season adapts Lee Child's novel Gone Tomorrow, with Alan Ritchson reprising the lead role. The plot summary describes a subway encounter with a distressed stranger that draws the character into a conflict with adversaries positioned at senior levels of power.

Ahead of that, Sterling Point premieres August 5. The coming-of-age drama follows a 17-year-old named Annie Jacobson, played by Ella Rubin, who inherits an island in Canada from a grandfather she barely knew. Keen Rufalo plays her twin brother and Jay Duplass her adoptive father. The setup is New York City to rural Canada, family secrets included.

The Chosen in the Wild with Bear Grylls lands August 9. The unscripted series moves the cast of the historical drama The Chosen out of a production environment and into forests, deserts and canyons. Jonathan Roumie, Paras Patel, Elizabeth Tabish, Noah James, Luke Dimyan and series creator Dallas Jenkins appear alongside Grylls, who guides the group through parachute jumps, cliff climbs and zipline crossings.

Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter arrives August 20. The documentary traces the player's ascent from wartime Serbia, and the announcement notes his 24 Grand Slam titles. Interview subjects include Djokovic, members of his family and other figures from tennis.

The Last Sunrise closes the originals slate on August 26. Adapted from a novel, the film follows a college student with a chronic illness, played by Maia Reficco, during a summer in Mallorca with her mother, played by Eva Longoria. Fernando Lindez plays a romantic interest.

Five originals across three weeks is a modest count next to some earlier months. July 2026 carried eight original premieres, and the June schedule added music livestreams on top of scripted work. August substitutes volume in sport and catalogue.

Nineteen live events, and almost all of them on a Thursday

The live sports grid is where August separates itself from the preceding months. Prime Video lists 19 scheduled events in the United States across four properties.

The WNBA accounts for ten of them, arranged as doubleheaders. August 6 pairs Las Vegas at Indiana at 7 p.m. ET with Los Angeles at Minnesota at 9 p.m. ET. August 13 runs Los Angeles at New York and Washington at Las Vegas. August 20 puts Indiana at Dallas alongside Atlanta at Los Angeles. August 22, a Saturday, carries Indiana at New York and Connecticut at Los Angeles. August 27 closes the month with Golden State at New York and Washington at Phoenix.

Four New York Yankees games appear, restricted to local Prime members: the St. Louis Cardinals visiting New York on August 5, two consecutive nights in Baltimore on August 19 and 20, and the Houston Astros in New York on August 26.

The National Women's Soccer League contributes four Thursday fixtures. Gotham FC appears in three of them, against San Diego Wave on August 7, Kansas City Current on August 14 and Portland Thorns on August 28. San Diego Wave meets Utah Royals FC on August 21 at 10 p.m. ET.

A single ONE Championship card completes the list, with Stella Hemetsberger against Natalia Diachkova on August 14.

That concentration matters for planning. Eight of the ten WNBA windows fall on Thursday nights, as do all four NWSL matches and the ONE Championship card. A buyer seeking simultaneous large audiences on Prime Video in August is looking at a handful of weekday evenings rather than a spread.

A counting discrepancy worth noting

Amazon's August announcement states that Prime Video will stream 30 WNBA regular-season games during 2026, featuring Caitlin Clark, A'ja Wilson and 2026 first overall pick Azzi Fudd. The June 2026 schedule put the same figure at 31. The 11-year rights agreement announced in July 2024 specified 30 regular-season WNBA games per season. Amazon has not published a reconciliation of the two counts, and the discrepancy is small enough to reflect a single rescheduled fixture rather than a change in rights.

NWSL coverage across the full 2026 season stands at 27 matches, including the NWSL Challenge Cup and playoff action, according to Amazon. That matches the 27-match figure the league set for 2025.

Sixty catalogue titles, 51 of them on August 1

The licensed film and series list runs to roughly 60 entries, with 51 landing on August 1 alone. The August 1 batch skews heavily towards library titles from the 1980s and 1990s: Blue Velvet, Fargo, Moonstruck, Mystic Pizza, No Way Out, Colors, The Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction and both versions of The Thomas Crown Affair. All four Robocop films arrive together, as do three Barbershop entries and both Hard Target films.

More recent additions include Interstellar, Licorice Pizza, Challengers, Women Talking and Bridesmaids in its unrated cut.

The remaining nine titles are spread thinly. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes arrives August 2. Piece By Piece and The Gates follow on August 7, Journey To Bethlehem on August 8, Blue Beetle on August 17, Is God Is on August 19, Back to the 90s and Good Fortune on August 21, and Nickel Boys on August 27.

Front-loading a catalogue drop on the first of the month produces a predictable pattern in browse and playback behaviour, and Amazon has repeated it in each of the last several monthly schedules. The July 2026 calendar followed the same shape, with more than 50 licensed titles concentrated on July 1.

What subscribers pay, and which tier sees the ads

Prime Video is bundled with Amazon Prime, which Amazon prices at 14.99 dollars per month or 139 dollars per year in the United States. Discounted memberships remain available to young adults and to qualifying recipients of government assistance, and a 30-day trial is offered to new members. Amazon directs customers outside the United States to their local Amazon site for regional pricing.

The advertising-relevant distinction sits above that base tier. Amazon replaced its 2.99-dollar ad-free add-on with a tier called Prime Video Ultra at 4.99 dollars per month from April 10, 2026, a 67% increase packaged with 4K streaming, Dolby Atmos audio, five concurrent streams and 100 offline downloads. Content access is identical across tiers. Everything on the August schedule reaches every subscriber; only the commercial break differs.

The advertising numbers underneath the schedule

Amazon reported second-quarter results on July 30, 2026, one day before publishing the August calendar. Advertising services revenue reached 19.8 billion dollars, a 26% year-over-year increase from 15.7 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2025. Total net sales came to 200.6 billion dollars, the company's first quarter above 200 billion, and operating income rose 43% to 27.5 billion dollars.

According to Amazon, inventory on Thursday Night Football, the NBA, the WNBA and NASCAR sold out during the period. The company also stated that it introduced more than 30 new advertisers to the NBA in the first year of that partnership, and that brands activating across multiple sports recorded 2.3 times higher unduplicated reach than single-sport advertisers, with multi-sport viewers generating 12% higher spend and 17% more orders on Amazon.

Those figures place the August schedule in a specific commercial position. Sold-out sports inventory in the second quarter means the WNBA and NWSL windows listed for August are not open ground. The 315 million global ad-supported viewer figure Amazon disclosed with its fourth-quarter 2025 results describes the reach; the sell-out describes the constraint.

Amazon's ad chief, Alan Moss, described Prime Video and live sport as a single business in a May 2026 podcast appearance, noting that 80 net new advertisers entered the NFL ecosystem through Amazon and 30 joined in the first year of the NBA deal. The August schedule reads differently once that framing is applied: it is not a list of programmes but a supply forecast.

Targeting and measurement built around this inventory

The tooling attached to Prime Video inventory has expanded steadily. Amazon enabled zip code-level targeting for Prime Video in October 2025, letting national advertisers generate thousands of location-specific creative variants from a single asset through the Amazon DSP Video template. That capability extended to Canada, Mexico and Brazil on July 21, 2026.

Amazon Marketing Cloud added Prime Video viewership signals in November 2025, exposing content title, content type and show-level engagement data inside the clean room environment. In practical terms, the titles on the August list become queryable dimensions once they stream.

Dynamic TV Creative, launched May 11, 2026, adjusts interactivity format, call to action, headline copy and product detail at impression time using shopping history, browsing patterns, Prime Video engagement, product availability and geography. Amazon scheduled its extension to live sports inventory and Prime Video Channels for the third quarter of 2026, which covers the August window.

Why the calendar matters to media buyers

Monthly content schedules are not advertising announcements, and treating them as such overstates their intent. What they do provide is a dated inventory map for a CTV surface that has become one of the largest in the market.

Three practical readings emerge from the August document. First, the live sports concentration on Thursday evenings compresses the month's high-simultaneity moments into roughly five dates. Second, the 51-title catalogue drop on August 1 signals where browse and playback volume will spike at the start of the month. Third, the absence of NFL, NBA or NASCAR programming from the August grid marks a genuine gap between the NBA Summer League run that filled mid-July and the return of Thursday Night Football in September.

That gap is narrower than it once was. Prime Video's rights portfolio now spans the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NASCAR, NWSL and, in Europe, the UEFA Champions League through 2031. Amazon carried the NBA Finals globally in June 2026. Video Advertising Bureau research published June 30, 2026 found WNBA streaming viewership up 56% between March 2024 and March 2026, with NFL streaming reaching 76% of fans.

August, in that sequence, is the quiet month. Ten WNBA doubleheader slots, four soccer matches, four regional baseball games and one fight card, wrapped around a returning franchise drama and five decades of catalogue film. For buyers modelling third-quarter programmatic delivery on Amazon inventory, that composition is the planning input.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon, through its Prime Video streaming service, published the schedule. Named talent includes Alan Ritchson, Ella Rubin, Keen Rufalo, Jay Duplass, Jonathan Roumie, Dallas Jenkins, Bear Grylls, Novak Djokovic, Maia Reficco, Eva Longoria and Fernando Lindez. Sporting properties involved are the WNBA, the National Women's Soccer League, Major League Baseball's New York Yankees and ONE Championship. The audience for the commercial reading of the document is media buyers, agency planners and publishers tracking connected TV supply.

What: Amazon listed five original premieres, roughly 60 licensed catalogue additions and 19 live sporting events for August 2026 in the United States. Reacher returns for a fourth season, and the catalogue drop concentrates 51 titles on August 1. The company separately reported second-quarter advertising services revenue of 19.8 billion dollars, up 26% year over year, and stated that inventory across Thursday Night Football, the NBA, the WNBA and NASCAR sold out during the quarter.

When: The schedule was published July 31, 2026, covering programming from August 1 to August 28, 2026. Amazon reported second-quarter results on July 30, 2026, for the three months ended June 30, 2026.

Where: The schedule applies to the United States. Amazon directs customers in other markets to their local Amazon site for regional availability and Prime pricing. New York Yankees games are limited to local Prime members.

Why: Prime Video functions as both a subscriber retention mechanism for Prime membership and an advertising surface reaching a disclosed 315 million ad-supported viewers globally. The monthly schedule is the only public, dated description of what that surface will carry, which makes it a planning input for buyers even though it contains no advertising terms. August's composition, with live sport concentrated on Thursday evenings and a large catalogue drop on the first of the month, defines where audience volume will sit ahead of the September return of NFL programming.