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Vikings-Eagles Sets New Amazon TNF Mark for Streaming Viewers

Anthony Crupi
·3 min read

Amazon Prime Video notched its biggest Thursday Night Football audience since it began airing the NFL streaming package last fall, as the Vikings-Eagles opener averaged 15.1 million viewers. The night’s deliveries handily out-drew Amazon’s previous high; per Nielsen, the service’s inaugural Chargers-Chiefs game on Sept. 15, 2022 averaged 13 million viewers—11.9 million of whom watched the live stream.

All told, 13.3 million fans logged onto Amazon’s stream, while another 1.1 million viewers in Philadelphia tuned in via their local Fox broadcast affiliate. The Fox station serving the Minneapolis-St. Paul market added 656,000 viewers to the hybrid tally.

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The higher deliveries put Amazon on a more even footing with its TV predecessor. In 2021, its final season of carrying the Thursday Night Football package, Fox averaged 16.2 million viewers per game.

As was the case throughout Amazon’s first season of Thursday Night Football, the Vikings-Eagles stream attracted a significantly younger audience than the NFL’s linear-TV broadcasts. Philadelphia’s 34-28 victory over the struggling NFC North champs averaged a 5.82 rating in the dollar demo, which translates to nearly 7.6 million adults 18-49—or 50.5% of the overall audience.

By way of comparison, 41.1% of NBC’s Sept. 10 Sunday Night Football audience were members of the under-50 set, while 37.3% of those who watched ABC/ESPN/ESPN2’s Monday Night Football premiere had yet to age out of the advertiser-coveted demo.

Viewers in the hard-to-reach 18-34 demo accounted for nearly a quarter (23.2%) of the TNF audience, a turnout that was in keeping with last season’s opener (22.8%). Over the course of its first slate of 15 games, the median age of Amazon’s NFL audience was 47 years, or seven years younger than the NFL’s linear-TV composition. The median age of the Vikings-Eagles audience was also 47.

An all-new slate of presenting sponsors have signed on for Season 2 of Amazon’s 11-year, $11 billion TNF commitment, including Verizon (pregame), State Farm (halftime) and JCPenney (postgame). While a complete turnover of brands holding premium sponsorships is almost unheard of in the sports-TV realm, Amazon’s big shakeup is a function of advertisers’ heightened demand for the sort of high-profile branding opportunities that are harder to come by on NBC, CBS, Fox and ESPN.

Verizon and State Farm are perennially among the top-five spenders in televised NFL games.

Amazon’s next TNF offering features a meeting between the New York Giants and San Francisco 49ers, two NFC teams that were on the opposite sides of a pair of Week 1 blowouts. Big Blue was shut out at home 40-0 by Dallas on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, while the Niners dismantled the Steelers 30-7 in Fox’s early Sunday window.

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