A year after NBCUniversal’s Peacock took a crack at streaming the first NFL playoff game to be carried exclusively by a non-TV outlet, Amazon Prime Video will have the next shot at trying to draw a Wild Card-grade audience online.
While Amazon has yet to provide further details as to how it landed its inaugural playoff outing, at least one person familiar with the matter said the online retail giant earned the rights to the game after meeting contractually-mandated audience benchmarks during its second season of Thursday Night Football. Including its new Black Friday showcase, Amazon’s 16-game slate averaged 11.9 million viewers, which marked a 24% increase versus its year-ago deliveries.
News of the shift from Peacock to Amazon comes on the heels of a Dolphins-Chiefs Wild Card stream that averaged 22.9 million viewers on the night of Jan. 13. As expected, the paywalled playoff was the least-watched of the 2024 postseason, although the Peacock exclusive didn’t fall all that shy of NBC’s Browns-Texans broadcast earlier that same day (25.9 million).
Amazon’s new playoff wrinkle was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
According to Nielsen, 1.35 million of the fans who watched the Miami-Kansas City rout watched via the NBC affiliates in the two home markets, which puts the streaming-only crowd at 21.5 million viewers. NBCU paid the NFL $110 million for the rights to carry the Wild Card game.
As much as fans were vocal about their disdain for a playoff with a cover charge—the NFL’s first foray into a paywalled playoff cost non-subscribers $5.99, or a one-month buy-in to the Peacock service—the turnout was sufficiently high to repeat the experiment again in 2025. Amazon’s reach could help put up even bigger numbers for the league, as the company boasts some 167.2 Prime subs in the U.S. Peacock closed out the year with 31 million paying subs.
With Amazon taking over the new streaming Wild Card game, next year’s opening round will feature two games on CBS, and one each care of Fox, NBC and ESPN/ABC.
Despite the somewhat limited Dolphins-Chiefs deliveries, overall viewing of the playoffs were up 8% year-over-year, with an average audience of 37.6 million viewers per window. For the NFL, the sequential gains served as conclusive evidence that a streaming exclusive isn’t detrimental to the overall consumption of its postseason games, which this year generated $1.22 billion in ad revenue.
