“Thursday Night Football” had its most-watched season yet, with or without the assistance of Nielsen’s new “Big Data + Panel” methodology.
NFL “Thursday Night Football” averaged 15.33 million viewers on Amazon’s Prime Video during the 2025 regular season, including local over-the-air simulcasts in the home markets — marking the highest average ever for the series. The previous high was 13.65 million in the 2019 season across FOX and NFL Network, with the caveat that Nielsen had not begun tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates at that point.
Nor had Nielsen shifted to the new “Big Data + Panel” methodology it unveiled this past September, which combines data from its traditional panel with that of smart TVs, set-top boxes and select providers’ internal first-party estimates (including Amazon).
This season of “TNF” would still rank as the most-watched on record even without the shift to “Big Data” — averaging 13.98 million on a ‘panel only’ basis — but out-of-home viewing likely makes the difference in comparison to years like 2019.
It should also be noted that the above comparisons cover only the Thursday games in the “Thursday Night Football” package, excluding Amazon’s current Black Friday games (which are part of a separate agreement) and the Saturday and holiday games that were part of the “TNF” package in prior rights deals. Amazon’s average includes its Christmas night Broncos-Chiefs game — its most-watched regular season game yet — as the holiday fell on a Thursday this year. But all prior Christmas games in the “TNF” package aired on other days of the week and are thus excluded, including high-viewing games like Browns-Packers on a Christmas Saturday in 2021 (28.6M).
Officially, it is Nielsen policy to compare the current “Big Data + Panel” figures to last year’s panel-only numbers. On that basis, “TNF” increased 16% from last year’s average of 13.20 million. But “Big Data + Panel” was being tracked prior to becoming the official currency in September, and Amazon regularly reported those numbers last season. As a result, it is possible to make an apples-to-apples comparison, with this year’s season average up 8% from 14.23 million. (The panel-only average is also up 8%.)
Notably, “TNF” ranks not far behind the season average for “Monday Night Football” this season, which was 16 million as of Week 16. Keep in mind the “MNF” average has traditionally not included local over-the-air simulcasts in the home markets, which the league mandates for all games not airing on broadcast television. Prime (and Peacock) have included those figures in their averages.
Continuing a persistent trend for sports on streaming services, “Thursday Night Football” skewed younger than the traditional linear packages. Its median age of 49.4 compares to 56.2 for the NFL on the linear networks.
