Amazon Prime Video’s debut with streaming Thursday Night Football might have had some glitches, but posted strong numbers relative to last year’s first Twitter broadcast.
The game between the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears drew an average worldwide audience of 372,000 that watched the game for at least 30 seconds, with each viewer watching the Packers’ easy 35-14 win for an average of 55 minutes.
That’s up from last year’s Twitter debut when an average audience of 243,000 watched a New York Jets-Buffalo Bills game for an average of 22 minutes of game action. The NFL this season switched from Twitter to Amazon, which landed a deal to stream 11 games.
Amazon Prime Video’s first game had 1.6 million worldwide viewers who initiated a stream, and including the pregame coverage the reach was 1.9 million combined viewers. Unlike Amazon, which operates behind a paywall and is free for subscribers, Twitter’s streams were available for logged-in and logged-out users for free, and the debut game last season reached 2.1 million viewers and 2.3 million viewers including the pregame show.
Twitter COO Anthony Noto retweeted a post noting that disparity and also including average audience numbers that Amazon disputes.
Amazon numbers less than spectacular: 1.9M streams, ~108,000 per-minute average. Last season, Twitter simulcasts averaged 2.5M/278,800…
— Anthony Crupi (@crupicrupicrupi) September 29, 2017
“An incorrect average audience figure was reported on social media, and subsequently shared by others, including in this story, regarding the debut of Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “As announced by CBS, the correct average minute audience (AMA) on Amazon Prime Video was 372,000, more than 50 percent higher than last year’s streaming partner posted for their first game. In addition, Prime members watched the game for 55 minutes on average, 2.5 times more than last year’s streaming partner.”
Amazon reported during the game that fans from at least 149 countries tuned in, and according to a spokesman, the final number of countries and territories was 187. At the end of the Twitter deal in 2016, it reported that the international audience was roughly 25 percent of the viewers and that an average of 3.5 million viewers per game had the game at least 50 percent in view on the screen for at least two seconds.
It remains to be seen how Amazon’s numbers will grow and how the quality of the stream improves, as some viewers reported brief issues with the Packers-Bears game.
