The NFL has decided to continue to exclusively stream playoff games as Amazon will exclusively host a Wild Card matchup in 2024.
While the Wild Card game will take place in January of 2025, it will be for the 2024 season. Amazon will not just have a Wild Card game in 2024, but they will continue to have one moving forward. Amazon already exclusively streams Thursday Night Football every week.
Amazon is no stranger to exclusively streamed NFL games
Amazon should not have trouble exclusively hosting games as they already stream Thursday Night Football every week. Viewership of the exclusively streamed games saw a 24% increase from the first year.
Amazon went from 9.58 million viewers per game in their first year of Thursday Night Football to 11.9 million viewers per game in their second year. The last year in which Thursday Night Football was on regular broadcast television, they brought in 13.2 million viewers per game.
The prospect of Amazon hosting a playoff game exclusively is much different than the prospect of Peacock doing the same thing. Amazon already has 200 million subscribers while Peacock had just 31 million at the end of 2023.
This means a lot less people would have to buy into a new streaming service to watch an NFL playoff game. While this seems like the beginning of a slippery slope, NFL chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp said in a Sportico article that the NFL wouldn’t exclusively stream a Super Bowl any time soon.
“I don’t think I’ll be working there when that happens,” Rolapp said during Washington Post’s Futurist Summit. “I think we’re a long way off from that. We had 200 million people watch the Super Bowl. I think the Internet could handle that technically, but we’re not quite there yet.”
“I think the NFL specifically, but sports in general, is really the reason why people are showing up to linear television,” Rolapp said. “It serves our purposes very well: The vast majority of our games are still on linear television and even the games we stream exclusively, like the Amazon games, are on over-the-air television for free in the local markets of the participating teams.”
Fans were not happy with last year’s exclusively-streamed NFL game
The large leap was taken by the league in 2023-2024, when the Wild Card game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins. A playoff game was unavailable to linear television viewers for the first time as the game was only available on Peacock and the NFL+ app.
According to Yahoo, the playoff game was the largest American streaming event in history. Beating out non-exclusively streamed Super Bowls and the launch of Disney Plus. It reigned in 27.6 million total viewers. The blowout matchup between the Cleveland Browns and the Houston Texans, another Wild Card game that was featured on typical broadcast television, brought in 29 million viewers.
It is important to note that the Browns-Texans matchup didn’t feature some of the most recognizable faces in the league, Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.
While the exclusively streamed playoff game broke records for Peacock and streaming as a whole, fans were not happy with a playoff game being behind a paywall.
I love my football but I’m sick of the NFL trying to milk every last penny they can out of us fans!
— 🇺🇸Scarlett Mayhem🇺🇸 (@ScarlettO66) January 19, 2024
Yeah. Screw the NFL. I’m not paying for an app to watch their games.
— John Hamblin (@JohnDHamblin) January 19, 2024
I call BS. This was an awful thing to do.
— JulieS 🟦 🦬🦬🦬 (@ntvnyer21) January 15, 2024
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