Thursday Night Football’s Amazon Prime debut was a ratings hit beyond all reasonable expectations.
Last week’s Chargers-Chiefs Thursday Night Football game averaged a 6.4 rating and 13.03 million viewers on Amazon Prime, a figure that includes local over-the-air simulcasts in the home markets. Excluding those simulcasts — around 602,000 viewers on LA FOX affiliate KTTV and 555,000 on KC NBC affiliate KSHB — Amazon Prime alone averaged in the neighborhood of 11.8 million.
The Chiefs’ win easily outdrew last year’s season premiere of Thursday Night Football, which aired exclusively on NFL Network and averaged a 4.1 and north of seven million viewers. Last year’s first TNF simulcast on FOX and NFL Network aired in Week 5 and averaged an 8.2 and nearly 15 million.
Notably, Amazon portion of Chargers-Chiefs averaged comfortably more viewers than the ESPN portion of the Monday Night Football audience in weeks one and two. ESPN and ESPN2 combined to average 9.9 million viewers for Broncos-Seahawks in Week 1 and 7.9 million for Titans-Bills in Week 2.
Of the 14 NFL windows this season, Amazon’s TNF debut placed second-to-last in household ratings and fourth-to-last in viewership, but ranks much higher in each of the key young demographics — ninth in adults 25-54 (5.7), sixth in 18-49 (5.1) and fourth in 18-34 (4.25).
As first reported by Advertising Age, Amazon guaranteed advertisers 12.5 million viewers per game for Thursday Night Football.
