NFL finalizes an 11-year media rights deal, with Amazon Prime Video as exclusive partner for Thursday Night Football; sources: Amazon is paying about $1B/year
Amazon will get exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football Stephen Battaglio / Los Angeles Times : NFL nearly doubles fees for TV rights; Amazon to get exclusive games for streaming Charlotte Walsh / Vulture : Amazon Prime Video to Stream Thursday Night NFL Games Frank Pallotta / CNN : NFL signs more than $100 billion in media deals and gives Amazon exclusive games Tweets: Alex Sherman / @sherman4949 : The NFL has a deal! Scoops here: *Amazon gets full exclusivity for $1b per year (as CNBC had reported) *NBCU paying about $2b for Sunday Night Football *ViacomCBS paying $2.1b for AFC *Fox paying $2.2b for NFC *Disney paying abt $2.7b for ESPN/ABC https://www.cnbc.com/... Nick Harris / @sportingintel : Premier League earns £3bn a year from all broadcasting, home & overseas rights. Qs grow over future value of live sport yet NFL sign new 11-yr contracts worth £7bn+ a year, domestic only! Huge increase. $1bn a year from Amazon alone! https://www.cnbc.com/... Steve Kovach / @stevekovach : Gonna be so many “buy now!” buttons on commercials during the Amazon NFL streams. https://twitter.com/... Edmund Lee / @edmundlee : one thing to note: Amazon's deal will give Amazon more leverage if/when it ever has to renegotiate Prime app distribution on Roku/Apple/Samsung/etc and, of course, for the broadcasters, that upcoming retrans fee negotiation could be a cable breaker for sure https://twitter.com/... Alex Barth / @realalexbarth : This is why the Patriots have been backloading their contracts. The salary cap is going to boom once this new TV deal kicks in. https://twitter.com/... Rich Greenfield / @richlightshed : WATERSHED MOMENT FOR STREAMING MEDIA AMAZON GETS ALL OF THURSDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL 🏈🏈🏈 https://twitter.com/... Alex Sherman / @sherman4949 : For Amazon, it gets a sure thing in the NFL that it can't replicate by throwing $ at scripts and hoping they succeed. Then again, Amazon is paying $1 billion per year for its package. Double then again, $1b isn't much to Amazon. Story with @JabariJYoung https://www.cnbc.com/... Peter Kafka / @pkafka : One big change for Amazon is that it will be producing the games itself instead of streaming broadcast TV coverage, as it (and Twitter) has done in the past. Will be interesting to see if Amazon goes plain vanilla with the games, to reassure league and viewers, or mixes it up. https://twitter.com/... Peter Kafka / @pkafka : Amazon getting exclusive rights to Thursday Night games is a big deal - by far the biggest Big Tech sports deal - and still shows you that the NFL wants/needs traditional TV and vice versa. Biggest and most important packages still going to the networks. See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon’s Thursday package began as a 10-game Prime streaming experiment and was renewed for 11 games in 2018. The new agreement turns that limited distribution role into exclusive control of the package.
The NFL is also spreading its broader rights across NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Fox, and Disney, while Amazon takes responsibility for producing Thursday games rather than carrying a television broadcast.
First-order effects
- Amazon Prime Video gains exclusive Thursday Night Football rights for 11 years at roughly $1 billion annually and becomes the game producer.
- NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Fox, and Disney retain their respective NFL packages under the wider rights renewal, preserving a multi-partner distribution model.
Second-order effects
- Amazon’s exclusive window makes comparable audience reporting central to its advertiser sales; the later Nielsen measurement agreement brought Thursday Night Football into Nielsen’s weekly TV report.
- The price and exclusivity raise the competitive bar for other platforms seeking live-sports rights, a contest later involving Apple, Amazon, and Google’s league-rights pitches.
Third-order effects
- The NFL’s package-by-package approach points toward a rights market in which leagues can pair broad-reach television partners with digital-exclusive windows.
- If streaming platforms continue to win exclusive games, sports distribution will increasingly depend on measurement systems that can compare streaming audiences with television audiences.
The trend: Live sports rights are evolving from TV-only bundles into split portfolios that use exclusive streaming windows to draw platform investment.