Amazon announced Tuesday that the Black Friday game on Nov. 24 will be available for all fans to stream for free. The 2023 season will mark the first time the league has scheduled a game for the day after Thanksgiving. The teams for the 3 p.m. ET game will be announced later.
Amazon, which last August paid $1 billion for 10-year rights to stream 15 regular season and one pre-season Thursday Night Football games on Prime Video — the NFL’s first exclusive national broadcast package with a digital streaming service — is now offering advertisers refunds or alternate ad inventory after audiences for the just-completed season fell about 25% of Amazon’s preseason estimates, one source says.
Prime Video wants to be a sports content juggernaut. The streamer already has exclusive rights to NFL Thursday Night Football, and on Thursday announced the launch of Sports Talk, a new 12-hour original sports-talk programming block.
LeBron James is partnering with Prime Video to bring a special version of his show Uninterrupted The Shop to Thursday Night Football. James, Maverick Carter, Paul Rivera and special guests will join TNF live from The Shop as an alternate stream offering, starting with the Tennessee Titans and Green Bay Packers game Nov. 17. TNF in The Shop will be an unmatched, watch-party-style experience, according to Prime Video.
Exclusives
The second week of Prime Video’s exclusive Thursday Night Football streams drew an average of 11.03 million viewers for a fairly low-wattage game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns. Nielsen and Amazon said the game marked a 39% improvement over last year’s Week 3 game, which was on on NFL Network. The 2021 game pulled in 7.96 million viewers across the cable channel, local-market stations and out-of-home sites. Nielsen’s tally for this year’s Thursday games rolls together the local stations, out-of-home and Amazon’s Twitch livestream platform.
Prime Video’s regular-season debut as the exclusive home of the primetime package comes on Sept. 15 when Kansas City hosts the Los Angeles Chargers. Kaylee Hartung has been hired by Amazon as the sideline reporter while Andrew Whitworth and Aqib Talib have signed on as contributors for pregame, halftime and postgame coverage.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Academy of Country Music Awards is heading south to Texas next year as they return to exclusively live-streaming on Amazon Prime Video in 2023. The country music awards show will be held on May 11 at the Ford Center at the Star in Frisco, an indoor football stadium at team […]
Ukonwa Ojo, who arrived at Amazon Studios and Prime Video close to two years ago as their chief marketing officer, is leaving. In a memo to staff about Ojo’s departure, Mike Hopkins, SVP Prime Video & Amazon Studios, wrote that he’s “reaching out to senior marketing team members in the coming days on how we best move forward.”
NFL cornerback Richard Sherman will serve as an analyst on Thursday Night Football, Prime Video announced Tuesday. Sherman joins an on-air talent roster that includes legendary play-by-play announcer Al Michaels, five-time Emmy-winning analyst Kirk Herbstreit and Pro Football Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez. Alongside Gonzalez, Sherman will contribute to coverage of each TNF game, as well as pregame, halftime and postgame segments.
Prime Video‘s exclusive hosting of Thursday Night Football will kick off Sept. 15 with Justin Herbert and the Los Angeles Chargers visiting their AFC West rivals, Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.
The Wheel of Time channeled itself a primo spot on Nielsen’s U.S. streaming chart ranking the Top 10 original series for the week of Nov. 15. With just a few days of eligibility for this measuring period, Prime Video’s already-renewed fantasy saga adaptation (which bowed on Nov. 19) debuted at No. 1 with 1.6 billion minutes viewed across its first three episodes — making it the second most-watched Prime Video original since Hunters (in February 2020).
After more than two years, the Prime Video comedy series will be back for Season 4 on Friday, Feb. 18, the streaming service announced Tuesday. For the first time in Mrs. Maisel‘s run, episodes will drop on a weekly basis instead of a binge-release rollout, with two new installments becoming available every Friday for four consecutive weeks.
Amazon is looking to add 24/7 live programming to its Prime Video service, according to multiple job listings posted over the past several weeks. The new channels could include live news, music and sports as well as scheduled movies and TV show showings.
The league is finally dropping a requirement that viewers sign in with a cable or satellite subscription, in hopes of expanding its online audience at a time when TV ratings are declining . Though there are restrictions — no free streaming on smart TVs, for instance — the move marks a significant departure for sports.
