Amazon’s Next Product, NFL Football?

05 Apr, 2017

The NFL is bringing a new meaning to “prime time.”

After a run with Twitter in 2016, the league’s Thursday night prime-time games are moving to Amazon Prime, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The site and the league have agreed to partner on a deal for the rights to stream 10 Thursday Night Football games, per the report.

The league keeps pushing the envelope on social platforms (signing a deal with Snapchat before the 2016 season) and in live-streaming select prime time games, moving from Yahoo!’s one-game run with the London contest in 2015, to a 10-game Twitter slate in 2016, and a similar schedule with Amazon in 2017. Twitter’s streaming of TNF enabled fans to watch games live on their mobile devices and engage via the social platform.

This time around, users will need to pay to play — well, watch — Thursday Night Football via live stream. The games will be available only to Amazon Prime members, which is more than 60 million strong, according to analyst estimates.

This is a big catch for Amazon, which is competing with Netflix and Hulu as a premier source of entertainment content. Amazon’s addition of the live-streaming deal builds upon an NFL foundation that began with its excellent, NFL Films-produced All or Nothing documentary series, which follows an NFL team through a season (Arizona in 2015). That series is set to premiere its second season, which follows the Los Angeles Rams during their 2016 campaign.

The 10 TNF matchups will also continue to be broadcast on live television in a package that is split between CBS, NBC and NFL Network.

NFL.com

Image vaniccilondon twitter

Mentioned In This Post: