Amazon (AMZN) purchased the rights to stream 11 Thursday Night Football games during the 2017 season, starting with the Bears/Packers game on September 28th; and they fully intend on maximizing their global audience. The e-commerce giant will offer 4 unique streams of each game in addition to the CBS broadcast; Spanish, Brazilian and Portuguese versions, as well as secondary English feed. Each feed will have their own announcers calling the game over the CBS-produced video.
Howie Long-Short: CBS Chairman Sean McManus doesn’t think Amazon streaming the game is going to have any effect on their ratings. It’s hard to argue against him. Amazon boasts 80 million Prime subscribers; but Twitter has 300+ million active monthly users and they only drew an average of 265,000 viewers/min during last season’s TNF games. How does Amazon even match those numbers?
Fan Marino: Relax NFL fanatics. The secondary English feed isn’t going to feature “homers”, a coaches film room or a roundtable of personalities. It’s designed for an English-speaking audience that is new to the game. Think Football 101.
