Advertising Age reports that Amazon said that its Thursday Night Football game a week ago - the first that was exclusively streamed on Amazon Prime Video - brought in a total of 15.3 million viewers across all platforms, and Nielsen said the game averaged 13 million viewers across the length of the game.
"Across all platforms" refers to the fact that the Amazon's game coverage was carried on broadcast stations in Los Angeles and Kanas City, the local markets of the teams in the game, the Chargers and Chiefs.
Amazon has originally predicted a viewership of 12.5 million.
Amazon previously said that it saw record Prime membership signups during the three hours the game was on - which was the whole point of spending $11 billion for a multi-year rights contract, since it is well-known that Prime members spend significantly more on Amazon than non-Prime members.
- KC's View:
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Streaming services are going to be more of a force in sports programming as they look to find unique, differentiated events to draw in subscribers. Having sports on traditional broadcast television used to be sacrosanct, since that's where the biggest mainstream audiences were. But as more people sign up for streaming services, and those services are willing to write big checks, traditional business models are being assailed. (Which is a business lesson for every traditional business.)
Note: If you want to watch Aaron Judge's continued pursuit of Roger Maris's American League single season home run record tonight, you have to do so on Apple TV.
We saw another example of the shifting winds yesterday when it was announced that Apple Music will sponsor the Super Bowl halftime show next February, a deal that probably cost Apple about $50 million a year for five years. Pepsi, which sponsored the show for almost a decade, announced that it no longer would do so earlier this year.
