‘Thursday Night Football’ Sees 41% Drop in Viewers on Prime Video for First Streaming-Exclusive Season
The ratings for the first year of streaming-exclusive “Thursday Night Football” are in, and Amazon might want to throw a challenge flag. According to a analysis of Nielsen ratings done by NextTV, Prime Video averaged 9.6 million viewers per game for “TNF” during the 2022 season.
That number represents a 41% decline from the 16.2M viewers “TNF” drew in 2021, when Thursday games were split amongst Prime Video, FOX, the NFL Network, and local broadcast stations. It’s also 32% lower than the previous lowest-rated season in 2020 when 14M people tuned in to “TNF” each week on average. The weekly ratings dropped as the season progressed, as Nielsen was rating each game at around 10.1M viewers in early November.
While the games were Prime Video exclusives, they were also broadcast on linear channels in the local markets for each team participating, eating away a subset of Amazon’s ratings.
Prime Video had always expected to garner fewer viewers for its inaugural season of exclusive “TNF” streaming, and softened the ground for such an audience drop-off by charging advertisers less per ad than they had paid in previous seasons. Amazon also employed the TV ratings firm Nielsen to measure its audience numbers, while simultaneously using internal data to track how many people were tuning in each week.
The good news for Prime Video is that the average age of viewers for “TNF” dropped by seven years over regularly-broadcast NFL games; the average viewer this season was 47 years old, a sign that younger audiences were much more comfortable finding and watching football in a streaming-only format.
This is a double-edged sword for Prime Video. On the one hand, it is capturing the coveted 18-49-year-old demographic better than broadcasts of Sunday NFL games. On the other hand, it validates the concern that makes some media companies and leagues hesitant to embrace streaming sports; older people aren’t tuning in as often. Older adults watch more live sports in general than younger people, making them a key audience segment that Prime Video isn’t fully cultivating.
Prime Video may have expected this ratings’ drop in Year 1, but it must do more in Year 2 to lure older audience members. The company paid over $1 billion per year for 10 years of exclusive streaming rights to “TNF,” and if it wants to see a significant return on investment on the advertising side of its investment, it will have to show them it can generate bigger audiences than it did in 2022.
Amazon Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video is a subscription video streaming service that includes on-demand access to 10,000+ movies, TV shows, and Prime Originals like “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” “Jack Ryan,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The Boys,” and more. Subscribers can also add third-party services like Max, Showtime, STARZ, and dozens more with Amazon Prime Video Channels. Prime Video also offers exclusive live access to NFL Thursday Night Football.