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For most of our NFL-watching lives, football has always occurred on Sunday, hence why Sunday Night Football has become the flagship broadcast. But since then, the sport has acquired several new teams and broadcasting sports as a whole started to change.
It wasn’t until the late 2010s that streaming services became more readily available for consumer use, effectively leading to the possibility to stream live football. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be discussing Thursday Night Football’s biggest viewing figures since they moved to Amazon Prime. Prime Video first started showing games in 2017, and Amazon got the exclusive rights to TNF from the start of the 2023 season.
Here we are going to take a look at how Amazon’s entry to the NFL has been reflected in viewing figures, and if you want to make comparisons you can check out the Biggest Sunday Night Football Viewing Figures.
The NFL Thursday night live-streaming debut was a huge success from Amazon’s platform, amassing a total of 13 million onlookers. To everyone’s surprise including the league, this game showed almost identical numbers to the normal NFL television broadcast. At the time, this was the largest ever prime time turn out for a game, subsequently leading to sport streaming services to be the next big thing,
While data gets easier to find as the years go on, Thursday Night Football never really hit its peak until this moment in October of 2021, although Amazon didn’t become an exclusive NFL partner until 2022. This was the first time in the modern streaming service era that a game had pulled in an absurd amount of viewers during prime-time TV. Overall, this game racked up 14.8 million live viewers and will go down as one of Thursday Night Football’s biggest viewing figures ever.
The recent September 2024 Bills vs. Dolphins game in Week 2 of the NFL drew in 14.96 million viewers, making it the third most-watched game since originally taking over prime time. During the second half of this game, it was reported that over 18.09 million viewers tuned in to watch at its peak. Over the years we see that streaming services have become more of a norm for watching all sports events, so it’s no surprise that the more recent games can pull in such a large number of viewers, especially considering the service is provided on Amazon Prime Video, an extremely popular platform.
The second most live-viewed NFL Thursday Night Football match was between the Vikings and Eagles in the early weeks of September 2023. This game accumulated over 15.06 million viewers and just beat out the 2024 Bills vs. Dolphins game by 10 million viewers. Both the Vikings and Eagles have super die-hard fans on both sides, so it’s not a surprise to see the Amazon-streamed game total over a whopping 15 million, making it one of Thursday Night Football’s biggest viewing figures in the history of the NFL.
Finally, we have the largest viewing figure for any Thursday Night Football game at 15.26 million viewers between the Seattle Seahawks and Dallas Cowboys in November of 2023. This goes down not only as the most-ever-watched watched Prime Video game, but also the most streamed NFL game in history. If one thing is for sure, it’s that the Dallas Cowboys never fail to pull in viewers and that watching on streaming services is only going to grow, so we can expect the number of viewers to increase on all platforms for Thursday Night, Sunday Night, and Monday Night football.
Liam has been a major sports fan and soccer player for over a decade, with a particular focus on major top-level soccer leagues, including the EPL, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and MLS. He has written numerous promotional articles for various top sportsbooks and continues to publish historical and factual sports articles covering the NFL, MLS, NHL, MLB, EPL and more.