By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
It appears Amazon’s billion dollar deal with the NFL for Thursday Night Football has been a resounding success.
Amazon’s Prime Video aired the first of its Thursday Night Football (TNF) matches on Sept. 15. Its deal with the NFL means that, outside of teams’ local markets, NFL fans need to tune in to Prime’s streaming service to catch their favorite teams. For fans in a local market, Prime Video syndicates the games to local broadcast TV stations.
According to an internal memo leaked to media, the game saw 47% more viewers than the NFL Network did in the same week last year, with 13 million viewers compared to 8.84 million.
The note to staff members at Prime from Global Head of Sports Jay Marine said the viewership set a new record for the streaming service.
“Our first exclusive TNF broadcast delivered the most watched night of primetime in the U.S. in the history of Prime Video,” said Marine. “This is a massive achievement. During our TNF broadcast, we also saw the biggest three hours for U.S. Prime sign ups ever in the history of Amazon – including Prime Day, Cyber Monday, and Black Friday.”
That last point is an even bigger deal for Amazon, a company that sees memberships as its lifeblood. When Prime Video was launched, it was seen more as a benefit for people who had Amazon’s premium delivery membership, called Amazon Prime.
Now, however, big blockbusters like the streamer’s House of the Dragon and now the huge numbers from TNF are showing that Prime Video is now a major driver of membership numbers in its own right … and that for many new members it’s the video service that is the primary benefit, and the free shipping is the nice-to-have perk.
The numbers also bear out the promises the public company made to media buyers when it projected an average of 12.5 million viewers per game for the TNF games. In fact, when you include other devices like big screen broadcasts in sports bars and restaurants, streaming on the Amazon-owned gamer site Twitch, and streaming on NFL+.
It is also a promise kept, as Amazon had told media buyers earlier this year that it was aiming for about 12.5 million viewers per game with TNF on Prime Video.
The deal appears to be supporting Amazon’s high stakes gamble on sports programming. The company is paying $1 billion a year for an 11-year-exclusive for the Thursday night games. While expensive, the ratings are likely to spur further investments by streaming companies into professional sports deals.