As more and more people cut the cable cord, the rise of television streaming has grown in popularity. The 2017 NFL season marked the first season of a partnership between Amazon and the league for streaming Thursday Night Football games. With one season now in the books, Amazon is reportedly looking to build of it’s first successful season, where they say viewership of the Thursday Night Game on Amazon Prime rose 17%.
Amazon Prime took over streaming the Thursday Night NFL games from Twitter. In their first season, they built on the audience Twitter had in 2016 with the averaging per-minute audience for the 11 games hitting 310,000, which equals the 17% increase from Twitter’s numbers.
Amazon’s feed for the games was cleaner than what is was on Twitter, which I thought was a given due to their strength in streaming with video services. Plus, it was delivered faster than some cable systems, and rarely had the usual online streaming delay that is normally experienced.
It is reported that most of the viewers were people who already were used to watching movies and television shows on Amazon’s platforms. These viewers stayed longer on the NFL stream than other viewers, with the average viewer watching for 63 minutes.
As it has been well documented every week this season, television audiences for the NFL dropped for the second straight year. Amazon’s streaming service was only a small fraction of the audience compared to the more than 10 million viewers who watched the Thursday Night Games on average on NBC, CBS and the NFL Network. The stats on NFL television viewership being down, doesn’t tell the whole story, as viewers are consuming content in a multitude of ways from streaming, NFL redzone, Facebook, etc.
Reports are that NBC and CBS pay $45 million per game for their rights to the Thursday night broadcasts. Amazon made a big splash financially paying $50 million for the rights to stream 10 Thursday night games and including one game on Christmas. The streaming deal is part of Amazon’s growing video division that includes their Prime video library, their studios production unit; and other sports streaming deals. Their deal with the NFL was obviously their largest. In 2017, Amazon spent $4.5 billion on video content.
Streaming video and live sports content isn’t something new, but it provides a company like Amazon to create a lucrative partnership with a league like the NFL. Plus, it provides the NFL with new possibilities for personalization that would increase engagement and revenue. Obviously, to view the games streamed by Amazon, you need to be a prime member. So, with Amazon being the e-commerce giant that they are, they could integrate selling merchandise to fans during the live stream of the games or targeting ads based on the data that they have on each prime member.
No one knows for sure what the future holds for Thursday Night NFL Games, but once the NFL decides they would then be inking another deal with Amazon to stream games. I would imagine it would be a similar set-up that we saw this past season with a split package between the streaming partner, Amazon, and broadcast partners. No matter what happen, I believe this was just a glimpse into what could soon be the future of watching live sporting events, that are customized to the viewer.
What to learn more about cutting cable cord: give this blog post a read to find out how you can do it.
