Amazon is reportedly interested in buying nearly two dozen regional sports networks, a bold gamble on the future of how viewers consume sports content.

The e-commerce giant is said to have bid for the 22 regional sports networks that 21st Century Fox is offloading as part of its sale to The Walt Disney Co., CNBC reported, citing unnamed sources.

Together, the networks air the games of 44 teams in the NBA, Major League Baseball and the NHL. An earlier report by Reuters that cited unnamed sources suggested the networks could be valued at over $20 billion, possibly Amazon’s biggest deal ever.

At a time when pay TV is in decline, sports content drives viewership across platforms. Owning rights to big franchises would help Amazon market its Prime program, especially if that membership included access to games. That could add more revenue, as Prime members tend to buy more on Amazon.

Growth in the number of Amazon Prime members in the United States has slowed. It hit 97 million members this year, up from about 90 million last year, according to an estimate from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Amazon streams Thursday Night Football on Prime, for which it paid $130 million for two years. But $20 billion is a big price tag for a business in which it has little experience. Regional sports networks are the middlemen of sports rights. They get paid by cable and satellite companies that carry the network. The network has to pay teams for rights to broadcast their games.

The problem is cable and satellite companies want to pay less to carry these networks, because fewer people are paying for television these days, while sports teams are looking for higher fees.

There are bargaining tools some companies could employ to make owning middlemen worthwhile.

A big media company could bundle the regional sports network with other channels, like Fox News, to get higher rates, making up for the corresponding increase in rights fees.

Local TV station owners, like Sinclair or Tegna, which are also interested in the regional channels, could bundle local news broadcasts with a regional sports network. Amazon doesn’t have such leverage, which may not matter.

Amazon could take the games off the cable and satellite systems and make them exclusively available to Prime members. Fox has already negotiated agreements for its 22 regional sports networks with most of the major pay-TV carriers.

Those contracts will have to be honored for the next three to five years. Even after those contracts run out, team owners may not want to limit the visibility of their games to a single online service.

Amazon also could make games available to Prime subscribers in addition to being carried on the local cable system. That way team owners don’t lose out on audience.

The cable operators are sure to balk. They likely don’t want to carry a regional sports network that a Prime subscriber could get for less than $10 a month.

And if the pay-TV operators refused to carry the networks, Amazon would face owners unhappy about their teams’ lack of visibility.Amazon seems to expect — or plan to create — disruption.

Streaming could become the dominant media business, which could mean that streaming companies become the leading sports broadcasters if they line up the right deals.

Amazon could aim to win exclusive rights for Monday and Sunday NFL games when they come up for renewal around 2021.