Amazon has renewed their deal with the NFL to be the exclusive streaming home of 11 Thursday Night Football games for the 2018 and 2019 season. Amazon was up against YouTube, Twitter, and Verizon for rights to the games. They streamed Thursday Night Football games in 2017 to 18 million Prime members. In addition to being streamed through Prime Video, Amazon says they will also stream the games through Twitch. Engadget is reporting that you won’t need to be a Prime member to watch the games on Twitch. Fox Sports will broadcast games between weeks 4 to 15 of the season and simulcast on NFL Network.
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Well I guess this explains the $20 raise for prime.
Smart to put it on Twitch but it’s unsustainable. The cost of sports rights will only go up and Amazon’s sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into something that has no value after the live broadcast concludes for people that won’t stick around after they lose the rights.
Ratings have declined for the NFL the past couple of years. Anti-American protests have turned off many fans. Twitch users are gamers and aren’t interested in sports. If you don’t have an unlimited data plan, then streaming isn’t a viable alternative, even if you don’t have to pay.
The genius of Twitch is that the content doesn’t have to be great. It only has to be decent enough to engage chat. Chat makes garbage like the Thursday Night games much more fun.
NFL fans and Twitch fans don’t really intersect but there is room for growth on Twitch for people that naturally wouldn’t give it a try. Drake playing with Ninja brought in alot of new people and Ninja’s numbers haven’t dropped. He’s still pulling in 100k+ viewers a day.
But I don’t see NFL fans staying once Amazon loses the rights.