The National Football League is renewing its deal to stream live Thursday Night Football games on Amazon Prime, which also puts Twitch users in the audience.
Per the agreement, 11 Thursday night NFL games, broadcast by FOX, will stream live on Amazon Prime and Amazon-owned Twitch. (They’ll also appear on the NFL Network and in Spanish on Fox Deportes.) Twitch users will not need an Amazon Prime subscription to view the games.
The NFL started streaming select games on Amazon Prime last year. Its first 2017 Amazon stream got 372,000 concurrent viewers, over 100,000 more than the average Twitter live broadcasts of TNF games pulled in the year before. Live games will be available to Prime viewers in both the US and all additional countries that have access to the service.
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“Having over 100 million Amazon Prime members provides a massive platform to distribute Thursday Night Football digitally, not only to our fans in the United States but also around the world,” said the NFL’s chief media and business officer, Brian Rolapp, in a press release.
As part of the deal, the NFL Films produced documentary series, All or Nothing, will debut its third season on Amazon Prime today, covering the Dallas Cowboys. Meanwhile, Twitch viewers will just get to see live games while taking advantage of the platform’s “interactive social” features, according to the release, which didn’t specify whether Twitch broadcasters will be able to co-stream the games.
Meanwhile, Twitch broadcasters have been co-streaming NBA G-League games since December 2017. Available on the league’s dedicated Twitch channel, the games also feature overlays of stats and rewarded viewers who tuned in regularly with a “loyalty” system.
TNF begins on September 13, but it will start streaming on Amazon and Twitch during the season’s fourth week, on September 27, when the Los Angeles Rams face the Minnesota Vikings.
