DirecTV inks deal with Amazon to keep Thursday Night Football in bars and restaurants

Thursday Night Football will be an Amazon Prime Video streaming exclusive starting later this fall, but bars and restaurants hoping to offer the NFL to their Thursday-evening patrons won’t need any broadband or even a single connected TV.

Tuesday, Amazon and DirecTV announced a multiple-year deal to bring TNF games to “300,000 sports bars, restaurants, hotel lounges, casinos and sports books, retail shops and services, and many other venues nationwide” via the satellite provider’s DirecTV for Business service.

The press release quotes DirecTV Chief Content Officer Rob Thun as saying the agreement “comes at an important time when more streaming companies are obtaining exclusive rights to marquee sports programming and fans want to cheer on their teams at home and while out at bars, restaurants and other businesses with friends, family and coworkers.”

Left unsaid: Broadband availability remains sufficiently spotty that many watering holes get only a trickle of internet bandwidth. With no last-mile high-speed connectivity coming to those places, DirecTV’s satellites in geostationary Earth orbit instead represent a last 44,472-mile fix (give or take a few miles to account for varying latitudes and longitudes of these Earthbound establishments).

“When this deal was struck, both Amazon and the NFL understood that access to Thursday night games would be a challenge for some venues,” wrote analyst Brett Sappington, a vice president with the research firm Interpret, in an email. “Amazon needed to find a work-around that would allow venues that weren’t set up for streaming video to receive games.”

The El Segundo, California-based DirecTV will first carry the last preseason NFL game Aug. 25, between the San Francisco 49ers and the Houston Texans, with coverage continuing of the next 15 weeks of Thursday games.

In an email, DirecTV publicist Thomas Tyrer declined to reveal financial terms of the deal or how many years it would encompass.

Amazon inked its exclusive Thursday Night Football deal with the NFL in 2021 after four years of streaming NFL games alongside CBS and Fox. The Seattle tech giant will have TNF as a Prime Video selling point through 2033. Last week, Amazon said it had signed up Nielsen to measure its TNF audiences, the first time Nielsen has been hired to track nationwide live streaming viewership.

Sappington forecasts more deals like this — but maybe not for too many years.

“As streaming services win exclusive sports distribution rights, we can expect more deals that mitigate connectivity challenges,” he wrote. “However, it is also likely that more venues will add streaming capabilities over time.”