Amazon says its season-two Thursday Night Football opener not only produced the biggest live-football audience ever for its Prime Video platform, but also an all-time streaming high for an NFL game, with viewing on Twitch and NFL Plus factored in.
Citing “panel-only” Nielsen National TV Ratings, Amazon said the NFC matchup between the Super Bowl runner-up Philadelphia Eagles and Minnesota Vikings averaged 15.1 million viewers across all digital and linear platforms, up more than 16% over last year’s Kansas City Chiefs-Los Angeles Chargers TNF opener.
(Total viewership actually increased to 16.6% with Amazon's first-party ratings data included. The MRC is currently reviewing a plan to combine Nielsen and Amazon's audience data for future live streams.)
Thursday’s game, according to Nielsen, delivered 3.5 million viewers age 18-34 across platforms and 7.6 million watchers in the 18-49 cohort. The total audience had a median age of 47, which is seven years younger than the typical NFL TV audience.
Indeed, Amazon has achieved a core objective of the league to skew younger.
Still, Amazon has been anxious to tout the audience potential of TNF with it as anchor rights holder (paying about $1 billion a season), ever since last season ended and reports surfaced that the overall ratings performance was down 41%.
Amazon has disputed the accuracy of this data on myriad points, starting with how Nielsen gathers its data.
Nielsen said it would start factoring in Amazon’s own first-party data and then changed its mind, following complaints by the Video Advertising Board, among other constituents.
