"Thursday Night Football" Moving from Fox to Amazon Prime in 2023
by Matt Webb Mitovich
March 18, 2021


In one of a series of multi-year, megabucks deals the NFL closed on Thursday with assorted outlets, Amazon Prime will become the league’s exclusive "Thursday Night Football" partner starting with the 2023 season.

(Fox has had broadcast dibs on TNF since 2018; prior to that, CBS and NBC divvied up the package of games.)




With this new, 10-year pact, Amazon Prime, which since 2017 had streamed the occasional matchup, will host 15 "Thursday Night Football" games as well as one pre-season game in the United States.

Beginning in 2023, “Thursday Night Football will be our first-ever digital package and we are thrilled to exclusively partner with Amazon to bring our games to more fans on more platforms,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. “NFL football drives passionate viewers and Amazon will enable us to continue to grow our fanbase in innovative and compelling ways.”

https://tvline.com/2021/03/18/thursday-night-football-amazon-prime-fall-2023/

NFL to make $10 billion a year in TV rights deal: ABC lands Super Bowl, Amazon gets Thursday games (https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Daily/Closing-Bell/2021/03/18/NFL-rights.aspx)

The NFL has finalized a $110 billion deal (https://awfulannouncing.com/nfl/nfl-amazon-network-rights-2033-10-billion.html) for the 2023 through 2033 seasons with CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and Amazon. The deal will mean that instead of CBS, NBC and Fox rotating the Super Bowl every three years, the Super Bowl will be rotated every four years between CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC. ABC, which last aired the Super Bowl in 2006 when Grey's Anatomy aired after the Big Game, will get the Super Bowl rights for 2026 and 2030 as part of the ESPN deal. The deal also gives Amazon Prime exclusivity to Thursday Night Football games at a cost of $1 billion per year. The Thursday games were previously broadcast on Fox, which shared them with NFL Network and Amazon. The Thursday games will only air on broadcast TV in the local markets of the teams playing each week. The deal also allowed each of the networks to stream their games in the future -- NBC Universal's Peacock will even show some games exclusively. The deal also allows ABC to broadcast three of ESPN's Monday Night Football games per year.

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ESPN is paying the most of all the networks, going from $1.9 billion per year to $2.55 billion per year for Monday Night Football (https://www.sportico.com/business/media/2021/nfl-renews-tv-rights-fox-espn-nbc-cbs-1234623948)
Amazon Prime will produce its own Thursday Night Football games, allowing for potential innovation and creativity (https://twitter.com/judybattista/status/1372653032161353730)
Here's a list of when each network will carry the Super Bowl (https://twitter.com/clarencehilljr/status/1372643715672596484): CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN/ABC will carry the Super Bowls, in that order, from 2023 through 2026 and from 2027 through 2030
ESPN is interested in NFL Sunday Ticket, but it has only had exploratory conversations (https://twitter.com/benjstrauss/status/1372665208125149185)


NFL's new TV rights deal is a bet on a pay-TV model that's been in decline (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/sports/nfl-media-rights-deal-espn-amazon-fox-nbc-cbs.htmlhttp://)

As The New York Times' Kevin Draper points out, the NFL's deal through the 2033 season is an eternity in the constantly evolving world of television. "The agreements, which will begin in 2023 and which mostly run through the 2033 season, fundamentally look quite similar to the last set of media agreements the N.F.L. signed in the early 2010s," says Draper. "Sunday afternoon games will remain on Fox and CBS, Sunday night games will remain on NBC, and Monday night games will remain on ESPN. The biggest difference is that 15 games on Thursday nights will be shown only on Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service. While front and center in the news releases, streaming really exists around the edges of the N.F.L.’s future. ESPN, CBS and NBC all announced that N.F.L. games would appear on their streaming services, but in almost all cases, those will be simulcasts of what is being shown on their television channels. Just a single game each season will appear exclusively on ESPN’s and NBC’s streaming services outside the home markets of the teams that are playing. None will appear on CBS’s or Fox’s services. That means that if you pay for a television package, as more than 80 million American households still do — though that is down from over 100 million in 2011 — and if you pay for Amazon Prime, which more than 126 million Americans do, you can continue to watch the vast majority of N.F.L. games, including the Super Bowl and every playoff game, without paying for a streaming service." Draper adds: "The fact that many N.F.L. games are available on streaming services could backfire for the broadcast stations. Consumers could have an incentive to get rid of their expensive pay television packages, adopting cheaper streaming alternatives. If too many make the switch too fast — paying just $5 a month for NBCUniversal’s streaming service, Peacock, instead of paying for NBC, USA, Bravo and other NBCUniversal channels through a pay TV package, for instance — the cheaper streaming services won’t generate enough revenue to help their parent companies pay billions of dollars to the N.F.L. each year. CBS, Fox and NBC will each pay the N.F.L. more than $2 billion a year, on average, about double what they paid under the old agreements, according to four people familiar with the agreements who requested anonymity because they were not authorized by the N.F.L. to speak publicly about the deals. ESPN will pay about $2.7 billion a year, on average, up from $2 billion."

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With new deal, the NFL finally is taking care of ESPN (https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2021/03/19/nfl-tv-deals-espn-monday-night-football-amazon-primehttp://): "For years, the Worldwide Leader had paid the most in rights fees in exchange for just a mediocre Monday Night Football game (and unlimited use of highlights on its studio shows), but that doesn’t make up for the troubles they’ve had with Monday Night Football," says Jimmy Traina. "In the new deal, though, ESPN gets some major perks, including flex scheduling for Monday Night Football beginning in Week 12 each season, a Saturday doubleheader in the season’s final week and, in their words, 'enhanced schedule quality.'"
Amazon's huge deal, paying $1 billion a year for exclusive Thursday Night Football games, also illustrates how closely intertwined big-time sports is with traditional TV (https://www.vox.com/recode/22338794/amazon-nfl-10-billion-tv-analysis)

NBC is set to produce Amazon's Thursday Night Football games with an eye towards having the team of Al Michaels, Peyton Manning and Maria Taylor (https://nypost.com/2021/07/15/nbc-trying-to-poach-maria-taylor-from-espn-in-time-for-olympics/)

The New York Post's Andrew Marchand reports that if all goes as planned, NBC would produce (https://awfulannouncing.com/amazon/amazon-reportedly-nearing-deal-nbc-produce-thursday-night-football-broadcasts.html) Amazon's Thursday Night Football package starting in 2022 with longtime Sunday Night Football producer Fred Gaudelli. Since Gaudelli has worked with Al Michaels on NBC's Sunday Night Football and ABC's Monday Night Football, Michaels would be enlisted to move over to Thursday Night Football. That would clear the way for Mike Tirico at Sunday Night Football. NBC is hoping to team Michaels with Peyton Manning, the most-wanted man in NFL broadcasting. Meanwhile, NBC remains in talks with Taylor, who could end up hosting Football Night in America and covering the Tokyo Olympics for NBC Sports. Taylor is still working the NBA Finals for ESPN (https://awfulannouncing.com/espn/the-looming-espn-and-maria-taylor-split-has-the-potential-to-get-really-awkward.html), which is still in negotiations with her. But her contract expires on July 20, the day of Game 6.

NFL Football on Sunday afternoon, Sunday night, Monday night, Thursday night. And then there is college football all day and all night on Saturday. Good grief.

Report: There's a 90% likelihood that Al Michaels will leave NBC to call Thursday Night Football games on Amazon (https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2021/09/20/report-amazon-90-percent-likely-to-hire-al-michaels-for-tnf/)

The New York Post's Andrew Marchand reports (https://nypost.com/2021/09/20/al-michaels-expected-to-join-amazon-thursday-night-football/) that Michaels moving to Amazon in 2022 is “not a done deal,” but that no one to whom he spoke expressed pessimism about the possibility.