On one of the industry’s busiest days in recent memory, a new Thursday Night Football streaming deal snuck in under the wire.
Amazon has acquired rights to live stream the ten Thursday Night Football games simulcast on NBC and CBS next season, news that was reported by a plethora of organizations late Tuesday — Sports Business Journal, The Wall Street Journal, Vox Media, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Bloomberg, ESPN.com and perhaps more.
Under the one-year, $50 million deal — five times what Twitter paid for the same rights last year — Amazon will stream the games only to its Amazon Prime subscribers. That is a shift from last season, when Twitter made its streams available to all logged-in users.
Other than the price tag, the paywall, and the fact that Amazon is entering the sports streaming space, there is not much else notable about the deal. Like Twitter last year, Amazon will be able to sell some ad units. Like Twitter last year, it will not have exclusive streaming rights, with CBS/NBC and Verizon also streaming coverage.
All the hubbub is surrounding a package that will generate perhaps 2/3rds of the TNF streaming audience, which itself is a mere fraction of the middling — by the standards of the NFL on primetime broadcast television — TNF TV audience.
(News from Sports Business Daily 4.4, Hollywood Reporter 4.4 and others)
