Airing a blowout for the second-straight week, Prime Video suffered another slight dip in its Thursday Night Football audience.
The latest edition of NFL Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video — the Jets’ rout of the Patriots — averaged 13.37 million viewers, down 4% from Giants-49ers last year (13.92M). That follows a 1% decline for the prior week’s TNF season opener, as 14.96 million watched the Bills blow out the Dolphins.
Despite the back-to-back declines, TNF has now scored 13 million viewers in back-to-back weeks for just the third time since moving to Amazon. The two-week average of 14.17 million is down just 2% from last year’s 14.48 million and up 19% from the comparable point of Prime’s inaugural season two years ago.
The Jets’ easy win — which peaked with 15.58 million during the 9 PM ET quarter-hour — trails only last year as the most-watched Week 3 edition of TNF since 2016 (Texans-Patriots: 17.55M), with the caveat that several of the intervening games aired solely on NFL Network.
TNF continues to deliver a younger-than-typical audience, averaging a median age of 47.5 thus far, compared to 54.3 for the traditional NFL broadcasters. There has been some debate as to whether Amazon is attracting younger viewers in excess, or merely that older viewers are not as easily able to find the game on Prime. Full figures for Week 3 are of course unavailable, but it should be noted that the network’s Bills-Dolphins opener ranked second in Week 2 among adults 18-34 and 18-49 behind only the CBS national window.
As goes almost without saying, TNF cruised past the rest of television Thursday night — including a regional edition of MLB on FOX (1.70M) and college football on ESPN (South Alabama-Appalachian State: 629K).
