As the competition starts to heat up, Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football viewership continues to trend down.
The latest edition of NFL Thursday Night Football (Saints-Cardinals) averaged a season-low 7.82 million viewers on Amazon Prime, marking the third-straight week that TNF has posted its smallest audience of the season. The previous low set a week earlier was 8.79 million (Washington-Chicago) and the low before that was 9.70 million two weeks ago (Colts-Broncos). Ratings were not immediately available, nor were local simulcast figures in the home markets.
TNF was the day’s top sporting event on any network — ranking ahead of the competing Yankees-Astros MLB American League Championship Series Game 2 on TBS (5.89M) and a pair of NBA regular season games on TNT (Bucks-Sixers: 1.57M; Clippers-Lakers: 2.10M) — but the competition no doubt took a toll. Thursday marked the first time this season that TNF aired opposite an MLB Postseason or NBA regular season game.
As one would expect, viewership plunged at least 40% from Broncos-Browns on FOX and NFL Network last year (~13M). Despite that sharp drop in viewership, ratings in adults 18-34 were on par with last year (2.7 for both, pending upward revision for last year’s game) and inched up from the previous week (2.6).
Younger viewers continue to make up a larger share of the Amazon audience than of the other NFL broadcasters. TNF this week averaged a higher rating in 18-34 (2.7) than last Sunday’s early doubleheader window on CBS (2.6) despite averaging little more than half the CBS audience of 13.45 million. The median age for Thursday’s game was 45, the lowest of any NFL game this season.
TNF is now averaging 10.3 million viewers so far this season.
(Nielsen estimates from Amazon, ShowBuzz Daily 10.21)
