Thursday Night Football has started the season with its two largest audiences since moving to Amazon.
The latest edition of NFL Thursday Night Football (Giants-49ers) averaged a 6.5 rating and 13.92 million viewers on Amazon Prime Video, trailing only Vikings-Eagles the prior week (15.05M) as the most-watched game ever on the platform. Ratings increased 20% and viewership 26% from Steelers-Browns last year (5.4, 11.03M).
Figures include local over-the-air simulcasts in New York City (854K) and the Bay Area (590K), meaning that 12.48 million watched the game on Amazon Prime.
TNF is now averaging 14.48 million viewers through two games, up 21% from the first two games last year (11.95M) and up 71% from the first two games in 2021 — which aired exclusively on NFL Network (8.45M).
Keep in mind that Nielsen is not including Amazon’s internal “first party” data into its viewership estimates for TNF, as was originally planned. Those figures are being included in a separate “Integrated Live Streaming Report” that has yet to be accredited by the Media Ratings Council. Per Amazon, Thursday’s game averaged 15.47 million under that measure.
As has been commonplace since Amazon acquired rights, TNF had a disproportionately young audience compared to the other NFL broadcasters. Adults 18-49 comprised nearly half (49%) of Thursday’s audience and 18-34s made up more than a fifth (22%), compared to 37 and 15 percent respectively for the other broadcasters.
Thursday’s 4.4 rating in adults 18-34 matched the latest edition of NBC’s Sunday Night Football (Dolphins-Patriots) and trailed only the CBS national window (5.4) as the highest of Week 2 in the demo.
The median age for TNF through two weeks is just 47, seven years younger than the other NFL broadcasters. Of the hundreds of sportscasts last week to average at least 100,000 viewers, only 20 had a younger median age younger — among them episodes of “The Pat McAfee Show,” other ESPN studio programs, Mexico-Uzbekistan soccer on Univision (43) and an Oregon-Marquette college volleyball match on FS1 (42).
(Some data from Amazon PR)
