Additional reports are backing up The Wall Street Journal on Amazon getting exclusive Thursday Night Football games.
The Athletic reported Monday that Amazon will have exclusive rights to a “healthy” and “meaningful” number of games in its expected deal for the NFL’s Thursday Night Football package. The report comes less than a week after The Wall Street Journal reported the same.
CNBC said last week that Amazon wants to exclusively carry all of the Thursday night games, and is willing to pay as much as $1 billion/year for that privilege, but the NFL wants to retain some for NFL Network. Per the earlier WSJ report, the NFL is required to keep at least five games per season on NFL Network in its deals with cable distributors.
Amazon is currently one of three outlets simulcasting Thursday night games, along with FOX and NFL Network. FOX and the rest of the broadcast networks are said to have lost interest in TNF because of the requirement that they share the games with NFL Network, a stipulation the league is evidently lifting.
In other NFL media rights news, ESPN executive Burke Magnus told the SportsPro OTT Summit USA last week that reports of Disney striking a deal with the NFL were “premature” and that the deal would not be “done until you see that press release, which is coming at some point I hope.”
As for more immediate NFL media news, Sports Business Journal reported last week that the league will push back the release of its 2021 schedule to the second week of May, the latest such release in recent memory.
[News from The Athletic 3.8, CNBC 3.5, SportsPro 3.5, Sports Business Daily 3.4]
