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Black Friday was hardly a discount situation when it comes to Amazon’s sports viewership on the unofficial holiday.
The streaming and online retail giant said Thursday that it averaged 16.33 million viewers in the U.S. on Amazon Prime Video for its Nov. 28 National Football League game between the Bears and Eagles. The figure is up 21% from last year’s 13.51 million average viewers for a Raiders-Chiefs game, and up 70% from the debut Black Friday NFL game in 2023 between the Jets and Dolphins.
According to Nielsen, the Bears-Eagles game was the most-watched sporting event on Black Friday since at least 1991, beating a 2022 FIFA men’s World Cup game on Fox between the U.S. and England.
The hefty increase for Amazon follows a record-setting Thanksgiving Day for the NFL involving Fox, CBS, and NBC, and burnishes the league’s immense power across the holiday weekend.
In addition to the NFL audience, Amazon also said it averaged 2.09 million viewers for two NBA games, beating a comparable basketball window last year by 121% and representing Amazon’s most-watched broadcasts of the league so far.
The full day and night of live sports, amounting to more than 15 hours of coverage, represented a landmark moment in the company’s history.
The Bears-Eagles game was shown globally for free following a recent adjustment to the broadcast plan with the NFL, and in addition to the U.S. audience, the contest reached a total of 5.29 million viewers, according to Amazon’s first-party data. The U.K., Germany, and Japan were the top international draws.
Another Game?
NFL executives have downplayed the possibility of adding a fourth game on Thanksgiving to tap further into what is the league’s biggest viewership day of the regular season. Adding to the Black Friday schedule, however, is more possible.
League commissioner Roger Goodell told The Wall Street Journal that he isn’t ruling out such changes, and that “we’re going to look at everything. I would expect that there will be changes going forward.”
Making such a move, however, would require working further around the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. That provision, designed to help protect college and high school football, prohibits “all or a substantial part” of pro football games airing on Fridays after 6 p.m. ET between the second Friday of September each year and the second Saturday in December.
Adding a second Black Friday game, as a result, would likely require scheduling that one before the existing one that starts at 3 p.m. ET.
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