A week after the NFL’s Thursday Night Football premiere on Amazon Prime, Nielsen says the September 15 game averaged 13 million U.S. viewers, per Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand.
According to Ourand, that number includes local broadcast viewership in Los Angeles and Kansas City. As the matchup was between the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers, TNF was broadcast in the teams’ home markets.
A total of 1.16 million people tuned into those broadcasts, meaning around 11.87 million viewers actually watched the game on Prime Video.
Overall viewership was slightly above Amazon’s expectations, as the e-commerce giant reportedly told ad buyers TNF games were likely to draw 12.5 million viewers.
But the final tally could be higher, Ourand noted, as Amazon said it logged 15.3 million viewers via "first party measurement and Nielsen, across all platforms."
Presumably, the additional viewers include those on Twitch, Amazon’s live gaming platform. Twitch’s Prime Video account also streams TNF games weekly.
Games will also be aired across 300,000 bars and restaurants throughout the country, thanks to a recent multi-year deal between Amazon and DirecTV.
With the TNF broadcast came a spike in new Amazon Prime subscribers, Amazon said via an internal memo earlier this week. The number of signups surpassed new additions on Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Additionally, the first TNF game of the season saw 47% more viewers than the NFL Network did in the same week in 2021 – an audience of 8.84 million.
Amazon last month tapped Nielsen to provide full measurement of the TNF broadcast as well as pre- and post-game programming on Prime Video and Twitch. It marks the first time a streaming service’s live program is included in Nielsen’s National TV ratings.
With the start of the NFL season came the first two Sunday Ticket games via DirecTV. Though this is DirecTV’s last season holding the broadcast rights before the sports package moves to streaming, DirecTV viewers have encountered a slew of technical issues trying to watch the games.
In other NFL related news, Verizon this week unveiled a promotion giving its wireless customers $30 off the annual subscription for NFL+ Premium. The league’s direct-to-consumer streaming service, featuring live out-of-market games for mobile devices, debuted in July.