EverPass announced a deal with Amazon to distribute the NFL‘s Thursday Night Football on Prime Video. The agreement announced Monday was made official in time for Thursday’s Week 3 matchup between the New England Patriots and New York Jets.
Already the exclusive distributor for NFL Sunday Ticket’s out-of-market package, EverPass now brings the majority of the league’s streaming partners to commercial establishments such as restaurants, bars and hotels.
“This partnership underscores our commitment to being the go-to provider for premium sports content for businesses,” Alex Kaplan, the firm’s CEO, said in a statement.
EverPass came to a similar agreement last summer with Peacock as the Comcast-owned streamer picked up two exclusive games for the 2023 season—a late December game between the Bills and Chargers and the Wild-Card matchup between Kansas City and Miami three weeks later. Amazon will have its own Wild Card playoff exclusive after a 24% increase in deliveries for TNF last season versus the 2022 season.
The NFL, through its 32 Equity venture capital arm, launched EverPass Media with RedBird Capital Partners in March 2023 to handle commercial licensing of its Sunday Ticket package. YouTube TV gained those out-of-market rights for individual customers ahead of the 2023 season in its seven-year, $14 billion deal with the league. DirecTV’s general network reaches more than 300,000 out-of-home establishments around the country.
It’s been a busy summer for the NFL’s distribution arm. In early July, EverPass signed a deal with Charter Communications to bring both Sunday Ticket and Peacock’s NFL games to Spectrum Business customers. A day later, EverPass announced its acquisition of UpShow, merging newer technologies into the company to stream Sunday Ticket and the like to their out-of-home customers. In addition, TKO Group Holdings, which owns WWE and the UFC, made a strategic investment into EverPass. (The amount of investment was not disclosed.)
(This story has been corrected in the second paragraph to note that EverPass is contracted with the majority, not all, of the NFL’s streaming partners. Netflix and ESPN are not included with the distributor. It also been updated in the fifth paragraph to clarify DirecTV’s reach.)
