Amazon’s Thursday Night Football will be the first exclusive sports streaming package to be measured by Nielsen.
Amazon and Nielsen have reached a three-year deal for the measurement company to track ratings and viewership for Thursday Night Football NFL games, Sports Business Journal reported Tuesday, marking the first time that Nielsen will measure programming that is exclusive to a streaming service.
To this point, data has been scarce for sporting events on streaming services. There has been no data released for Major League Baseball games on Peacock or Apple TV+, NHL games on ESPN+ or Notre Dame football on Peacock.
The most recent Amazon-exclusive NFL game — 49ers-Cardinals in Week 16 two years ago — is said to have averaged 4.8 million viewers, a figure that was based on the “estimated numbers of viewers per living room device that streamed the game.” It was not clear what measurement platform generated the figure.
Per Advertising Age, Amazon is guaranteeing advertisers 12.5 million viewers per Thursday night game, a figure that would be far in excess of previous NFL games carried exclusively by a streaming platform.
The first Nielsen-measured content will be Amazon’s 49ers-Texans preseason game a week from Thursday.
Nielsen does provide estimates for exclusive streaming programming on Netflix and other services, but it is not analogous to the national numbers it typically releases.
