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The NFL season doesn’t start for months, but Peacock and Amazon have already scored big wins.
On Tuesday, the NFL announced two exclusive streaming games for the upcoming 2024 season. NBCUniversal’s Peacock secured the rights to stream the Week 1 game in São Paulo, Brazil, on Friday, Sept. 6, with the Philadelphia Eagles announced as a participant.
Meanwhile, Amazon received the rights to an upcoming Wild Card game—the second time an NFL playoff game has been available exclusively via a streaming service following last season’s Wild Card game on Peacock.
According to Hans Schroeder, NFL executive vice president of media distribution, there was an “interconnectedness” to the NFL’s decision of where the exclusive streaming games would go.
“The game Amazon ultimately earned was the game Peacock had last year,” Schroeder told ADWEEK.
Schroeder explained that Amazon, which is the exclusive home of Thursday Night Football, had the “ability to earn a Wild Card game” in its deal, which the company did with its results from the 2023 season.
In Prime Video’s second season of exclusive Thursday Night Football games, ratings were up 24%, with an average of 11.86 million viewers per game.
“That’s getting very close to where we were a couple of years ago when the games were on Fox and NFL Network,” Schroeder said. “It’s above the World Series. It’s above the NBA Finals, and so you look at those data points.”
And though Amazon earned Peacock’s Wild Card game, the league “really wanted to do something” to acknowledge the historic performance of Peacock’s 2023 exclusive Wild Card matchup. That game, a meeting between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins, averaged 23 million viewers, making it the most-streamed live event in U.S. history.
The game in Brazil—the NFL’s first-ever regular season game in South America and the first time the league has played a game on Friday night of its opening weekend in over 50 years—appeared to be the perfect opportunity, especially with NBC having the season opener featuring the Kansas City Chiefs the day before.
