Amazon lands an exclusive NFL playoff game for streaming next season
Amazon is getting its turn to exclusively stream an NFL playoff game.
The tech giant will carry a wild-card game during the 2024-25 season, according to people familiar with the plan who were not authorized to comment. The game provides an opportunity for Amazon to bring a massive audience to its Prime video platform.
The NFL declined to comment on the move. An Amazon representative did not respond to a request for comment.
NBC carried a wild-card game on its Peacock service on Jan. 13, delivering what it called the largest live streaming audience in history with an average audience of 23 million viewers. It’s likely the game, a Kansas City Chiefs victory over the Miami Dolphins with pop superstar Taylor Swift cheering them on, helped Peacock add substantially to the 30 million subscriber total it has reported to Wall Street analysts.
The CBS Sports chairman, who joined the network in 1996, spent a lifetime in control rooms that brought the biggest events to the nation’s living rooms.
Amazon recently finished its second season as the exclusive home of “Thursday Night Football,” which saw a 24% increase in audience compared with the prior year, averaging nearly 12 million viewers according to Nielsen data. The streamed games reach a substantially younger audience than the ones airing on traditional television.
Amazon is getting the playoff game next season due to a performance clause in its exclusive deal to carry the NFL’s Thursday night package.
Like all NFL games, the playoff telecast will be available on broadcast television in the markets of the teams competing in the contest.
But it will be the first playoff game in NFL history to primarily air on a platform not owned by one of the legacy media companies that have carried the NFL over the last 30 years.
The Amazon deal comes several days after Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp. — all of which NFL are media partners — announced plans to launch a subscription streaming service that will carry cable and broadcast networks with live sports programming. The still-to-be-named service is expected to be up and running by mid-August, in time for NFL exhibition games.
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