Amazon’s ‘Thursday Night Football’ draws 13 million viewers in debut

Jared Gans
·2 min read
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Amazon’s first exclusive “Thursday Night Football” game drew in an average of 13 million viewers, according to data from Nielsen.

The retail giant’s football streaming debut last week, which featured the Kansas City Chiefs against the Los Angeles Charges, peaked at 14.6 million viewers on Prime Video, Nielsen said in a release.

The 13 million average is 47 percent higher than last year’s second week of “Thursday Night Football,” which was shown on NFL Network, according to Nielsen.

Amazon said last week’s game averaged 15.3 million viewers when including “all available data on every platform from Amazon’s first party measurement metrics” and Nielsen Media research.

In addition to Prime, the game was also available in the local markets of the two teams, for out-of-home viewing, on Amazon’s Twitch streaming service and on NFL+, the league’s streaming service.

The Chiefs defeated the Chargers in the game, 27-24. The next “Thursday Night Football” game will feature the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cleveland Browns.

Amazon aggregates direct viewing data from millions of devices and accounts watching to establish a “comprehensive” picture of the viewership across its channels, the release states.

Nielsen found that the average age of the audience for the game, 46 years old, was on average seven years younger than the traditional television audience through Week 2 of the season. The audience was also eight years younger than last year’s average “Thursday Night Football” audience.

The National Football League reached an 11-year agreement with Amazon and other companies to provide access to games. Amazon.com is the exclusive NFL partner for “Thursday Night Football” after it was previously on Fox since 2018.

Multiple other streaming services like Hulu and ESPN+ have taken steps to acquire access to stream professional sports. More than half of this season’s NHL games will be shown on ESPN+ and Hulu, while MLB games this season have been shown on AppleTV+ and Peacock.

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