Stream On: ‘Thursday Night Football’ Viewership Up 24%

There’s one week left in the NFL’s regular season, but Amazon has already concluded its second year of exclusively streaming Thursday Night Football, which delivered big viewership gains on Prime Video. The 15 games in 2023 drew an average of 11.86 million viewers, up 24% from Amazon’s debut TNF season in 2022 (9.58 million average audience).

Those figures are still down from the 16.2 million viewers Thursday night games averaged during the 2021 season on Fox and the NFL Network. And Amazon’s numbers continue to fall well short of the 20 million-plus viewers that routinely tune in to NFL games on Fox, CBS, and NBC each Sunday, as well as ABC/ESPN on Mondays.

But the growth is promising for Amazon, and it comes despite a failed effort prior to the season to change how Nielsen measures its streaming number. The NFL and Amazon wanted the media monitoring service to incorporate first-party streaming data into audience measurements for TNF, a move that irked some leaders at linear networks. 

Nielsen ultimately decided not to use that method for official viewership numbers. However, with the first-party streaming data added in, Amazon says TNF games averaged 12.95 million viewers during the 2023 season. Efforts to accredit that reporting style are currently under review by the Media Rating Council, with the hope of change coming next season.

Still Getting Younger?

While streaming is typically considered more of a younger person’s forte, the key 18-34 demographic for TNF actually grew at a smaller rate during the 2023 season than its overall audience. The 2.4 million average figure for those viewers was a 14% increase from 2022. However, the age group is still trending up since TNF’s switch to exclusive streaming, beating out the 1.9 million average seen in 2021 on linear television.