Amazon and the NFL will once again partner to stream Thursday Night Football, with Amazon Prime Video streaming 11 games during the 2018 and 2019 seasons
Kurt Schlosser / GeekWire :
Context & Ripple Effects
This renewal extends a relationship that began when the NFL and Amazon struck a $50M deal to stream 10 Thursday night games to Prime members in 2017 — five times what Twitter had paid the year before. The 2018-19 package ups the commitment to 11 games per season, keeping Amazon in the non-exclusive tier of rights holders.
The move matters because it was the stepping stone to exclusivity: three years later the NFL finalized an 11-year media rights deal making Prime Video the sole home of Thursday Night Football, at a reported ~$1B/year.
First-order effects
- Amazon Prime Video's slate grows from 10 to 11 games per season, deepening its live-sports catalog as a Prime retention lever while the NFL banks another multi-year streaming fee on top of its broadcast packages.
Second-order effects
- A successful two-season run gives both sides the performance data — audience reach and signup lift — to justify the leap from simulcast partner to exclusive rights holder, squeezing traditional TV partners out of the Thursday night window.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, live sports becomes the anchor tenant of subscription streaming: rights fees escalate toward exclusivity, and measurement follows the money, as seen when Nielsen struck a deal to include Amazon's TNF streams in its weekly TV report for the first time.
The trend: NFL media rights are migrating from broadcast incumbents to streaming platforms, with short non-exclusive deals serving as proving grounds for billion-dollar exclusive packages.