Amazon Prime Video’s $13.2 billion NFL live-game streaming experiment got off to a solid start in 2022, but questions remain about how ultimately successful it’ll be for all involved amid the uncertainty of the television and streaming industry.

As that entertainment delivery ecosystem continues to be reshuffled as consumer habits change, a lot of attention is being paid to the Amazon-NFL relationship and what it could mean for the future of live sports consumption — which currently does yeoman’s work propping up the pay-TV bundle.

Now we have our first full-season data set.

The e-commerce behemoth’s 11-year deal with the league to near-exclusively stream “Thursday Night Football” (TNF) averaged 9.58 million viewers in Nielsen Media Research-only audience numbers for the inaugural 15-game package, and 11.3 million viewers when the Nielsen data is combined with Amazon’s internal first-party metrics.

The best TNF eyeball numbers came in Week 2 (which was the TNF season debut because Week 1 on Thursday was the NBC season-opener special) when 13 million (Nielsen) or 15.3 million (Nielsen + Amazon) watched the Kansas City Chiefs edge the Los Angeles Chargers, 27-24. The lowest TNF viewership was 6.8 million/9 million for the Panthers beating the Falcons, 25-15, on Nov. 10.

Six of the 15 TNF games averaged 10 million-plus viewers in Nielsen-only data.

The first game had a lot of curiosity around it, which led to inflated viewership — a common occurrence for something this new. The more realistic viewership, close to NFL Network numbers, came over the subsequent 14 weeks.

This is a long-term deal, so while game-by-game averages are interesting, they’re ultimately less important than the whole because Amazon doesn’t control the slate of games it’s handed by the NFL, and it cannot flex late-season games like other networks.

So how do we interpret these numbers?

First, only the Nielsen viewership numbers matter because that’s what commercial airtime is sold against, and they’re down from when TNF was tri-cast last season on Fox, NFL Network and Amazon (which simulcast the network feed for some but not all games in 2021).

The 14 Thursday night games during the 2021 season on Fox and NFL Network had a weighted viewership average of 13.33 million, Amazon said.

While no one wants to lose audience, TNF still did better than many experts and critics predicted, by millions of pairs of eyeballs, despite the games going behind a streaming paywall. That’s in part because of the ongoing chaos in the broadcast industry and also because the NFL is a U.S. television powerhouse that commands loyalty like nothing else.

“It’s a pretty amazing achievement,” said Patrick Crakes, a former Fox Sports executive turned media consultant.

The not-unexpected audience decline was a trade-off the NFL was willing to make, to sacrifice the reach of its Thursday package in return for a big rights payment increase — reportedly about 80 percent more than TNF had under the former broadcast arrangement.

In other words, even with a loss of nearly 4 million viewers on Thursdays year over year, the NFL got a pay hike to $1.2 billion this season for the TNF streaming package.

While the TNF audiences beat some estimates, and the NFL’s pile of gold got bigger, the eyeball decline was stark compared to when the games were nationally broadcast on Fox and the NFL Network together.

“This is pretty significant (streaming viewership), but let’s be honest — in context, it’s a big decline. It shows you are going to lose people when you go to streaming,” Crakes said.

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The Thursday package has never been the primary engine for the NFL’s TV domination. None of its games approached NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” viewership, which sits atop prime-time ratings. Sunday’s season-ending Lions-Packers SNF broadcast averaged 23.6 million linear and digital viewers, the property’s best finale audience in six years, NBC Sports said, while the 18 SNF games averaged 19.9 million viewers.

The overall NFL regular season averaged 17.1 million viewers per game in 2021, and the league’s linear TV audience average record is 18.1 million viewers set in 2015. The 2022 average isn’t yet available.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with the first season of ‘Thursday Night Football’ on Amazon Prime Video,” said Hans Schroeder, executive vice president and chief operating officer of NFL Media, in a statement from the league. “The success of TNF this season with our first-ever all-digital partner marks an important moment in our industry and further increases our focus on looking for new and different ways to deliver our games to fans and reach new audiences.”

NFL executives have previously said that the week-to-week TNF audience numbers are not a critical internal talking point — the league absolutely does track every piece of data, you can be sure — because the initial focus is on Amazon delivering the quality broadcast to which fans are long accustomed.

Outside of streaming quality for some viewers, it’s generally agreed that Amazon delivered on the production front. They looked like NFL games that fans have watched for years.

“It did look and sound like a legacy NFL broadcast. That’s one of the reasons it was so well received,” said Jon Lewis, who has tracked and analyzed viewership data at Sports Media Watch since 2006.

Streaming quality was an issue for many viewers, something Amazon attributes largely to fans’ internet provider quality and speed, and their home equipment.

Amazon is not commenting aside from statements in a press release that sums up the season’s streaming performance.

“Amazon has earned a strong reputation for making big bets, and given the unprecedented scale of this challenge and the hallowed place that NFL coverage holds among millions of fans, the launch of ‘Thursday Night Football’ ranks high among our most ambitious enterprises,” said Jay Marine, vice president, Prime Video, and global head of sports, in a statement. “We are only at the beginning of a long-term mission, but are ecstatic with the results and achievements of this first season, bringing millions of viewers to Prime Video every week.”

What the press release didn’t address was Amazon’s internal success metrics. The company hasn’t disclosed any specifics on its expectations versus how the season played out.

One of the known objectives of the NFL relationship is to grow Amazon’s Prime business, known for two-day free delivery and its vast library of streaming content, and is said to have about 80 million U.S. users.

In the wake of the first regular-season TNF game this season, an internal email made public reportedly said that Amazon enjoyed its “biggest three hours for U.S. Prime signups ever” during the stream.

No specific subscription numbers were disclosed, and Amazon has not publicly addressed any subscription growth linked to TNF since. A request for comment on the topic was sent to Amazon’s media relations staff.

Fresh subs aren’t the only business metric for Amazon. It uses TNF as a platform to promote its products and services, including other shows and content.

The company does rightfully boast of viewership successes this season.

One of Amazon’s talking points is the median age of TNF streaming viewers — 47, which the streamer said is “seven years younger than the average median age of viewers watching the NFL on linear TV.”

Amazon also noted that 22 percent of its TNF viewers aged 18-34, which was better than the 14 percent for NFL games on TV networks and 7 percent of overall prime-time viewers of any programming. Thursday night games were the most-watched programming on 13 of the 15 nights Amazon streamed the NFL in 2022 and won at 15 nights in both the 18-34 and 18-49 demos, the company said.

Reaching younger fans and turning them into regular viewers and consumers of NFL games and products is a chief strategic goal for the league and its network partners to ensure a financially healthy future — the same goal every sports league has to survive long-term.

In the even younger 18-34 demo, Amazon said TNF averaged 2.11 million viewers, which was 11 percent better than last season when the Thursday package was shared with Fox and NFL Network as a tri-cast.

Sports Media Watch’s Lewis is one of the industry observers who thought Amazon TNF would draw smaller audiences. While noting that the viewership overall was lowest in a decade for the Thursday package (and the games were not on any broadcast channels), he’s impressed by how TNF on Prime unfolded, especially by the younger age demos it enjoyed.

Lewis termed the 18-34 metrics for TNF as “spectacular.”

“Ultimately, you’re looking to create your next generation that has loyalty to your product,” Lewis said. “I think you have to be thrilled with that (number).”

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If the Nielsen numbers are the ones that matter, why does Amazon report two audience numbers?

Advertisers trust Nielsen, which has provided not only viewership totals since the early 1950s, but also demographic breakdowns by age, gender, race, income and other data points that advertisers crave as they pick and choose where to spend ad dollars to reach their potential customers.

Amazon can track how many people are streaming but cannot replicate Nielsen’s demographic information, so it hired Nielsen last summer and agreed to price advertising during TNF based on Nielsen-only numbers.

Nielsen isn’t beloved across the TV industry, has limitations on its ability to track streaming and digital audiences, and has undercounted some sports, but for now, it remains the currency by which the TV industry conducts business.

Amazon’s promised TNF audience for advertisers was reportedly 12.5 million. We know now that Amazon didn’t achieve that, but it’s unclear if it will have to provide bonus ad time or equivalent marketing opportunities to advertisers for failing to meet the number — termed “make-goods” in industry lingo.

The Nielsen numbers include out-of-home (people watching at bars, restaurants, hotels, etc.), and also over-the-air simulcasts on local TV affiliates in the home markets of each week’s participating teams. Those local linear television simulcasts accounted for about 10 percent of the total audience each week, Amazon said.

Per Sportico, NFL games accounted for 82 of the 100 most-watched programs on domestic TV in 2022 based on Nielsen measurements, up from 75 in 2021 when the Summer Olympics on NBC eked out a few spots. The NFL, led by the 112.3 million-viewer Super Bowl LVI in February along with the rest of the playoffs, took 32 of the top 35 spots by audience total in 2022, with the three outliers being the State of the Union speech, mid-term election coverage, and college football’s title game.

The money generated by NFL TV advertising and sponsorships helps the networks pay the media rights fees that fuel much of the league’s salary cap system that drives payroll and personnel decisions. The $208 million per-team player salary cap in 2022 was calculated in part by the enormous national media rights deals that make up the majority of the NFL’s $11 billion shared by the 32 teams in 2021.

Staying atop the shrinking TV eyeball heap, and getting a lasso around the growing streaming audience, is how the NFL and its media partners are trying to maintain dominance and keep the cash flowing.

That’s a long way of saying the Amazon TNF numbers are important, but only as one element of the NFL’s wider domination of American TV.

And the league is apparently satisfied enough with its Amazon streaming endeavor (or ran out of potential partners) that it opted to ink a seven-year, $14 billion deal with Google’s YouTube TV to stream the out-of-market NFL Sunday Ticket package that DirecTV previously had since 1994. The new deal begins next fall with many details still to come.

While streaming is not profitable, networks and tech companies are increasingly paying for live sports streaming rights as a strategic maneuver for the long term, with the assumption streaming will continue to eat into the pay-TV cable/satellite bundle (with some analysts predicting a leveling out while streamers consolidate and bundle services in coming years).

That trend can be seen not only with Amazon and the NFL but Apple signing deals with Major League Baseball to stream Friday doubleheaders and with Major League Soccer to stream every match beginning next season.

Apple, Amazon, and Google have generally deeper pockets than their traditional media counterparts in the sports space, but not unlimited funds. Big tech is seeing increasing numbers of layoffs.

Amazon, whose 1.5 million workers make it the nation’s second-largest employer after Walmart, recently announced 18,000 mostly retail, devices, and corporate jobs will be cut beginning later this month because of global economic uncertainty and as people return to pre-pandemic buying habits.

The Amazon layoffs don’t affect its NFL streaming operation. And it’s not an unprofitable company even if its financials have softened: In the third quarter that ended Sept. 30, Amazon reported its net income falling to $2.87 billion from $3.15 billion year over year, even as third-quarter net sales increased to $127.1 billion from $110.8 billion in 2021.

That comes as Amazon pays $1.2 billion for TNF and $465 million for the inaugural eight-episode season of “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”

Amazon, which reportedly paid handsomely to hire Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit for its TNF booth, reportedly charged $500,000 for 30 seconds of ad time, which is down from the $635,439 Fox charged a year ago, according to Ad Age. The discount is attributed to the expected smaller streaming audience.

The Prime Video app reportedly has about 80 million U.S. subscribers, and there are an estimated 172 million domestic Amazon Prime subscribers (who pay $139 annually or $15 a month for just the video app). Fox is available in 114 million U.S. homes while NFL Network is in 52 million, per estimates from S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Kagan and Sports Business Journal.

One early positive sign for the NFL-Amazon relationship is an expansion. In 2022, Amazon and the NFL announced a TNF-branded game would be played on Black Friday in 2023, the day after the league’s enormously successful Thanksgiving triple-header that broke viewership records this season.

We don’t know if Amazon made any money on its NFL deal in 2022, but it may not matter for a while. Ultimately, Amazon’s NFL success may be what billionaire owner Jeff Bezos thinks it is, Lewis said.

“A lot of this is ego. But what was it for Rupert Murdoch?” he said, referencing the Fox network founder who successfully built it around landing NFL rights in the early 1990s.

If Bezos wants to be a player in the sports space, Year 1 of “Thursday Night Football” was a success and can help open doors for other sports rights, Lewis added.

“If you want to be a factor in sports media, you have to get the rights. Does it make business sense, not necessarily,” Lewis said.

(Photo: Nick Cammett / Getty Images)