The National Football League has finalized a one-year contract with Amazon to serve Amazon Prime customers to watch 10 "Thursday Night Football" games through live streaming service in the upcoming season, according to multiple reports Tuesday evening. The deal is worth $50 million, which increased from $10 million paid by Twitter last year.
Prime customers, who pay $99 per year for the Amazon membership (including free shipping and a video service with a library of movies and TV shows), will likely be able to access the games for free. An analyst estimated that the Seattle-based e-commerce company has more than 60 million Amazon Prime members globally.
While CBS and NBC will broadcast the Thursday Night Football games on national television, Amazon will stream games in networks' coverage simultaneously. The league's cable, NFL Network, will also broadcast the Thursday night games. Amazon will hold the rights to sell a handful of advertising spots per game.
Prior to the agreement won by Amazon, the NFL received proposal submitted by Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Google's Youtube, demonstrating that technology companies were expressing interest in streaming the games, according to a report by Recode.
Amazon aims to reach and grow online audience
Last year, Twitter, widely considered as one of the world's most popular social media outlets, defeated Amazon in reaching a live-streaming rights deal with the NFL to broadcast Thursday night games.
The league partnered with the social networking site in hopes of appealing to wider audiences to watch football games when Twitter had 300 million global users at the time.
Based on the result, Twitter and NFL discovered that the game live streaming experience did not produce a big impact on audience worldwide. As the 2016 season came to an end, the Thursday Night Football games drew an average Twitter viewing audience of 266,000 per minute.
The average of television viewing audience on CBS and NBC was 15.8 million.
A few months ago, the NFL expressed concerns that fewer younger viewers are watching football games and that the league's ratings for the games slumped last season. While the NFL seeks an effort to speed up ratings, the league pledges a partnership with Amazon to draw more younger fans in the coming season.
People rely on cable services to watch sporting events online.
"Reach is a focus of ours. I think Amazon has been able to demonstrate, in everything that they do, massive scale," NFL's Executive Vice President of the Media Brian Rolapp said. "I don't think this is limiting the reach. I think this is expanding the reach."
At this point, it is not clear how Amazon will use digital platforms to stream the games.
