Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football Viewership Up 24% in 2023

Amazon Prime Video
(Image credit: Amazon Prime Video)

Ratings for Amazon Prime Video’s second season of exclusive "Thursday Night Football" (TNF) jumped 24% among total viewers over the previous season (11.86 million vs. 9.58 million), according to Nielsen. Amazon says TNF’s across-the-board viewership gains in 2023 included 13 weeks of double-digit, year-over-year gains among total viewers, as well as its second consecutive season of double-digit increases in the hard-to-reach P18-34 demographic.

Amazon said Prime Video’s TNF audience is almost seven years younger than those watching the NFL on linear networks, and nearly 14 years younger than audiences watching prime-time broadcast television during the Fall 2023 season.   

“We’re still very much at the beginning, but Thursday Night Football’s record growth in our second season is beyond encouraging as we work to super serve fans and advertisers,” said Jay Marine, vice president, Prime Video, and global head of sports. “We are building TNF on Prime into an incredibly valuable franchise, and our production and tech teams deserve a great deal of credit for the quality and innovation we have delivered to fans, and we are just getting started.”

The 2023 TNF on Prime season kicked off in September with a Vikings-Eagles matchup that averaged 15.1 million viewers, making it the most watched TNF game ever on Prime Video, as well as the most streamed NFL game in history, Amazon said. On November 30, those records were broken by a the Seahawks-Cowboys TNF game that attracted an average audience of 15.3 million viewers, and a peak audience of nearly 18 million. 

Other season highlights included the launch of a new NFL tentpole event with the inaugural Black Friday Football game, and double-digit viewership growth across all pregame and postgame shows, including TNF Tonight and TNF Nightcap, which grew +24% and +10%, respectively.     

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Tom Butts

Tom has covered the broadcast technology market for the past 25 years, including three years handling member communications for the National Association of Broadcasters followed by a year as editor of Video Technology News and DTV Business executive newsletters for Phillips Publishing. In 1999 he launched digitalbroadcasting.com for internet B2B portal Verticalnet. He is also a charter member of the CTA's Academy of Digital TV Pioneers. Since 2001, he has been editor-in-chief of TV Tech (www.tvtech.com), the leading source of news and information on broadcast and related media technology and is a frequent contributor and moderator to the brand’s Tech Leadership events.