Amazon Prime will replace Twitter as the rightsholder to stream 10 of the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games next season, and according to what a person familiar with the deal told Recode, Amazon agreed to pay the league around $50 million.
Amazon will offer the game to Amazon Prime members using the Amazon Prime Video app for TVs, game consoles, set top boxes and connected devices, which includes Amazon Fire TV, mobile devices and online. According to Recode, CBS and NBC would also have the rights to stream the games they broadcast and also that Verizon could stream the games to its subscribers.
While Twitter had offered the streaming of NFL games to logged-out users, Amazon Prime membership comes with a charge. But despite what is essentially a paywall for fans to watch the games, the NFL appeared confident that viewership would grow with games being streamed on Amazon instead. The league noted in its press release Wednesday that games were available to “tens of millions of Amazon Prime members worldwide.”
“Reach is a focus of ours. I think Amazon has been able to demonstrate, in everything that they do, massive scale,” NFL Chief Media and Business Officer Brian Rolapp told Recode. “I don’t think this is limiting the reach. I think this expanding the reach.”
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Recode reported last month that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube had also expressed interest in streaming the Thursday Night Football games later this year. Recode also reported last year that Amazon had been among the companies interested in streaming NFL games in 2016.
Twitter ultimately paid around $10 million and five times less to stream the 10 Thursday Night Football games last year, according to Bloomberg, which reported months later that Amazon could ultimately find an opening into video rights from the NFL by offering streaming as an add-on to Amazon Prime.
The deal with Twitter ultimately resulted in an average of 3.5 million viewers per game that watched the action on Twitter while about 55 percent of those viewers were under age 25. Twitter executives consistently said the company was happy with those results, as the deal had been the most prominent sports league to help highlight the social media site as the destination for all things live.
But the NFL also had previously worked with Amazon. On Friday, it was announced that Amazon had approved Season 2 of its original series All or Nothing for Amazon Prime members. The series produced by NFL Films will focus on the Los Angeles Rams in Season 2 and can be streamed on the Amazon Prime Video app.
“Our focus is on bringing customers the best premium video programming, when and how they want to watch it,” Amazon senior vice president of business development & entertainment Jeff Blackburn said in a statement. “Streaming Thursday Night Football on Prime Video is a great step for us toward that vision, and offers tremendous new value for Prime members around the world. And we’re thrilled to extend our ongoing content relationship with the NFL – the gold standard for sports entertainment – on behalf of our Prime customers.”
Said Rolapp in a statement: “We are continually looking for ways to deliver our games to fans wherever they watch, whether on television or on digital platforms and we are thrilled to bring Thursday Night Football to Amazon. As has been the case with all our streaming initiatives, we look forward to continuing to innovate with our partners as we learn the best ways to serve our fans both this season and into the future.”