Thursday Night Football’s move to Amazon has been moved up by a year.
Amazon will take over rights to the NFL’s Thursday Night Football package a year earlier than planned in 2022, it was announced Monday. Per Sports Business Journal, Amazon wanted to start its new deal as soon as possible and FOX “was happy to get out of its deal early.”
FOX won rights to TNF in 2018 in a five-year deal worth anywhere from $550-$650 million per year. The coming 2021 season is the fourth under the deal. Prior to FOX, CBS and NBC split rights in 2016 and 2017.
The traditional networks had clearly fallen out of love with TNF, which only began airing on broadcast television in 2014. CBS and NBC were clearly unenthusiastic about renewing back in 2018 and FOX did not even make it all the way through its five-year deal. At issue, per a report in Sports Business Journal last year, was the networks’ lack of exclusivity. Whether CBS, NBC or FOX, the broadcast networks had to share each of their TNF games with NFL Network and a streaming partner (Twitter in 2016, Amazon since 2017).
Amazon will not have that problem in its deal. It will be the exclusive home of 15 Thursday night games per year, sharing them only with over-the-air affiliates in the participating markets. NFL Network, which has carried every game in the TNF package since it began in 2006, will continue airing seven non-Thursday games per season, according to SBJ.
Per SBJ and the Wall Street Journal, Amazon’s deal is worth $1.2 billion per year — about double the previously-mentioned rights fee FOX is currently paying. Exact figures had not been previously known.
