Amazon paid a prime-time price to be the exclusive distributor of Thursday Night Football and last week showed one of the reasons why it is has been willing to pay for the snoozefest that was much of last season. Make that nearly 18 million reasons.
The Dallas Cowboys and Seatle Seahawks game last Thursday delivered the kind of viewership that any TV provider would crave much less a streaming provider. Peaking at 17.76M viewers at 9:26PM EST, the stream averaged 15.6 million viewers.
While that does not stand up to the kinds of ratings seen by major broadcast networks for the NFL, see last year’s top 10 rated games here, the NBA championship series last year on ABC averaged 11.5 million viewers. Through the first 11 weeks TNF is averaging more than the 2023 NBA Finals did. More fun with numbers. NBA telecasts across ABC, TNT and ESPN averaged 1.59 viewers. Sure there are more games so there is less emphasis on each contest, but Amazon’s numbers show why the NFL is ratings gold, and why its worth billions to TV providers.
The game featuring “Americas Team” was the most streamed NFL game ever, which really means over the last few years. Keep in mind the Super Bowl is streamed but only as an option against regular network broadcasts. It points to a trend that the audience for sports might well be transferable to streaming if the fanbase is educated enough to understand the platform.
Would this work for other platforms? With the NFL, maybe. But it should be kept in mind that when Amazon signed on with the NFL it had well over 100 million Prime subscribers. It bet that a large enough number of its current audience would watch and that the opportunity to do so would also spur others to sign up. And as long as you are signed up check out the sale for….
And that’s the thing about Amazon that makes it different than any other streaming service. It can use ratings to leverage traditional advertising, while also selling advertising within its app, via a service that promotes buying everything else in the world and shipping it to your door.
So Stream on NFL and Amazon. I’m sure this is just the beginning of a long friendship.
