Amazon has a pretty great viewership story to tell through nine weeks of the NFL season.
Per Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch, Thursday Night Football viewership has reached the highest level through Week 9 since 2019 when the package aired on Fox and NFL Network. So far this season, Amazon’s TNF is averaging an audience of 13 million viewers, up 4% year-over-year.
As has been the trend since Amazon secured exclusive rights to the Thursday night package in 2022, the median age of its viewer clocks in as significantly younger than its traditional broadcast television counterparts. According to SMW, the median age of a TNF viewer this season is 48 as compared to 55 for other NFL broadcasters.
Early in Amazon’s tenure, critics suggested that the lower median age was a result of older viewers not finding the games on streaming rather than an influx of younger viewers watching. Now, however, that argument holds little weight as TNF is drawing audiences comparable to the package’s old linear television home.
The strong viewership on Amazon has to be encouraging for the NFL as well. The streamer will exclusively air a playoff game during the Wild Card round this season, similar to how Peacock did so last year. Slowly but surely, fans are acclimating to a media environment where some games air on traditional linear networks while others are streamed.
No doubt this is part of the NFL’s long-term plan. Five years from now, when the NFL will likely opt-out of its current media rights deal, the league would prefer a media environment where viewers watch games on linear and streaming in equal numbers.
Perhaps that shift is happening even quicker than the league anticipated.
