The season premiere of NFL “Thursday Night Football” may provide the clearest indication yet of the ambiguity of viewership measurement in 2025.
Amazon Prime Video averaged 17.76 million viewers for Packers-Commanders on the season premiere of “Thursday Night Football,” which is officially the largest audience for “TNF” since it moved to Prime Video. The previous high was 17.29 million for Packers-Lions last December.
But the comparison is apples-to-oranges. The Packers-Commanders figure is based on the Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” metric, which combines the traditional Nielsen panel with data from set-top boxes and smart TVs. Under Nielsen policy, networks are to compare this year’s “Big Data + Panel” figures to last year’s panel-only data.
While “Big Data + Panel” became the official Nielsen currency on September 1, it had been tracked separately the prior two years and regularly reported by Amazon Prime Video. Packers-Commanders actually trails the “Big Data + Panel” figure Amazon reported for last year’s Packers-Lions game, 18.48 million. (It would still rank second among “TNF” games on Amazon, clocking in slightly ahead of 17.61 million for Cowboys-Giants in September of last year.)
Officially, Packers-Commanders increased 19% from last year’s “TNF” opener, Bills-Dolphins. But again, that is a comparison to last year’s panel-only figure of 14.96 million, in compliance with Nielsen policy. Compared to the Big Data + Panel figure Amazon reported for Bills-Dolphins a year ago, viewership increased 12% from 15.79 million.
It should be noted that on an apples-to-apples basis, “TNF” still performed well, scoring a double-digit increase and its second-largest audience. But the 19% gain and record-high are purely a function of methodological changes.
The Packers’ win, which peaked with 20.35 million viewers in the 9:15 PM ET quarter-hour, outdrew all of the Week 1 NFL game windows in the key young adult demographics of 18-34 (3.94M), 18-49 (8.80M) and 25-54 (9.36M). Continuing a trend throughout Amazon’s run with the NFL, “TNF” had a considerably lower median age (46.9) than the linear networks (55.0).
