Amazon Wins Streaming Rights For “Thursday Night Football” With $50M Bid

Update:

The NFL and Amazon officially announced their agreement to stream “Thursday Night Football” as part of Amazon’s Prime membership for the 2017 season.

“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“, said Brian Rolapp, Chief Media and Business Officer for the NFL.  “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.” 

“Our focus is on bringing customers the best premium video programming, when and how they want to watch it.  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,” said Jeff Blackburn, Senior Vice President, Business Development & Entertainment, Amazon. “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.”

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John Ourand of the Sports Business Daily reports that Amazon has won the rights to stream “Thursday Night Football” games.

Last year, Twitter paid $10 million for the right to livestream the 10 Thursday night games, but Ourand reports that Amazon paid $50 million for the rights this year after Twitter’s one-year deal expired.

Facebook and YouTube were also among the bidders for Thursday package.

Amazon has been looking to add live sports rights to their Amazon Prime video service and this will be a big step in accomplishing this. They also have the “All or Nothing” series that featured the Arizona Cardinals last year.

One benefit with going with Amazon is that it allows them to sell advertising around their “All or Nothing” series.

Ourand says that the NFL liked Twitter’s younger audience and the fact that 25 percent of their audience was outside of the United States. However, money clearly talks and Amazon is spending five times as much for this package as they got from Twitter last year.

The NFL has only committed to short-term deals while they test how these packages perform.