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After a breakthrough NFL season in 2025, Amazon is beginning its next Thursday Night Football campaign with a matchup between Super Bowl contenders.
The streaming and online retail giant said Monday at its upfront presentation to advertisers in New York that it will begin the next season of TNF with a matchup between the Lions and Bills. Perhaps more notably, the Week 2 primetime showcase on Sept. 17 will represent the first regular-season game at the new Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y.
That venue will be the Bills’ new home, and it will start a run of next-generation venues being developed around the NFL—with that wave including other teams such as the Titans, Commanders, Browns, Chiefs, Broncos, and perhaps the Bears.
The company’s unveiling, meanwhile, follows a banner campaign that included a 16% increase in average per-game viewership in 2025 to 15.33 million, representing the highest audience level in the 20-year history of TNF on any network. The season featured a series of milestones for Amazon, including a Christmas Day audience of 21.06 million, setting a company record during the regular season.
Amazon then followed it up with an average audience of 31.6 million for a wild-card playoff game between the Packers and Bears, which set a league streaming record on any platform.
The news of the TNF opener is one of several unveilings by NFL rights holders in advance of the full schedule drop on Thursday.
NBC kicked off that sequence with its announcement of another NFC East rivalry, the Cowboys and Giants, to begin its Sunday Night Football schedule. Fox then followed its own announcement of an Eagles-Cowboys game in the late-afternoon window on Thanksgiving Day.
That complete unveiling of the 2026 NFL schedule will include the matchup that Amazon will have for the fourth iteration of its Black Friday showcase on the day after Thanksgiving. Last year’s Black Friday game between the Bears and Eagles averaged 16.33 million viewers, up 21% from 2024.
