A low-scoring finish to the Thursday Night Football season held up reasonably well in the ratings, if on the lower end of the scale.
The season finale of NFL Thursday Night Football (Seahawks-Bears) averaged 11.04 million viewers on Amazon Prime Video and local affiliates in the home markets, up 7% from Jets-Browns last year (10.29M) and up 13% from Cowboys-Titans in 2022 (9.73M). Viewership was the highest for the final Thursday night game of a season since 2020, with the caveat that the final such game in 2021 was an NFL Network exclusive.
The Seahawks’ low-scoring win averaged about the same number of viewers as Broncos-Chargers the previous week (11.03M). The two games rank ahead of only Broncos-Saints in October (9.81M) as the least-watched on TNF this season.
Amazon will release full season averages for TNF later this week. The series had been trending at a five-year high entering Week 17, though it is likely that the relatively soft tune-in will result in this year’s average slipping to a three-year high behind 2021 — the last year TNF aired on broadcast television — when all is said and done.
Though it was the final Thursday night game of the season, Seahawks-Bears was not the last game on Amazon Prime Video. The streamer has an exclusive Wild Card playoff game next month that will undoubtedly deliver its largest audience yet.
Despite airing a regular schedule of NFL games, Prime Video has thus far not had the big events that have drawn record audiences to Peacock or Netflix. The streamer’s high water mark of 17.3 million is well short of the more than 20 million who watched last year’s Wild Card playoff game on Peacock or last week’s Christmas Day games on Netflix.
