Football fans have been forced to subscribe to Prime in large numbers.
Big surprise: people love football!
This is perhaps the biggest takeaway from Amazon’s first real NFL stream, which happened last Thursday night. A huge early-season game between two Super Bowl contenders — the Kansas City Chiefs and the Los Angeles Chargers — has become the first regular-season NFL game to be streamed exclusively through Amazon Prime (or any other streaming service). streaming, by the way). People in the Kansas City and Los Angeles markets could watch it on live television, but in the rest of the country it was only streamed.
Amazon’s stream was a glitzy production with a slick animated intro, brand new theme song, and two really great teams that produced a super entertaining (and close) game. And, according to the closest we have to actual metrics, it was a success for Amazon.
Thursday Night Football on Prime (apparently) killed it
According to an internal memo from Vice President of Prime Video and Global Head of Sports Jay Marine, the Chiefs-Chargers game looked good for Amazon on two fronts.
First, it was supposed to be the “most-watched US primetime night” in Prime Video history. Second, it delivered the highest number of signups over a three-hour period that Amazon Prime (which costs $140/year) has ever seen. For reference, Prime already had around 200 million subscribers worldwide.(opens in a new tab) before all of this, and it’s been since last year.
Since these Prime membership stats were shared by Amazon itself, you should take them with a grain of salt. These are, of course, hand-picked metrics that don’t include specific numbers, like the exact number of people who registered Thursday night. They may not be wrong or bogus, but they don’t tell the whole story, and nothing will until Nielsen provides his official ratings. These have not been published at the time of writing.
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There is additional context to consider. For starters, this was the first streaming-exclusive NFL regular season game for most Americans. Given the popularity of football in the United States, there could be millions of people who realized that night that they needed Prime Video to watch the game and signed up in desperation. I know I needed to have a long phone call with my dad to explain how he could watch the game, even though he already had Prime Video handy.
Clearly, anyone who feverishly signed up to watch football last week won’t need to do so again for the next 14 weeks of Thursday Night Football on Prime. Amazon won’t be able to brag about these subscription numbers every week. Yet even with this limited information, it’s clear that Amazon made the right choice by paying $1 billion a year for the rights to a football game every week. Although not everyone was happy with the quality of the stream. (It was mostly perfect for me.)
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A finger in every pie
It’s possible that Amazon’s Nielsen ratings are somewhat low for the first TNF game. It would be hard to match or surpass the 17.9 million viewers that last season’s Thursday night thriller Chiefs-Chargers drew on a combination of network and cable television, according to Sports Business Journal.(opens in a new tab). But even if the numbers aren’t quite there now, Amazon has that deal for another 11 years. They will come in due time.
And that’s good because Amazon probably doesn’t care much about raw ratings, beyond what it has to give ad buyers. Each new Prime subscriber is potentially $140 upfront for the company and Prime has become an essential service for many because of all the different perks it offers: free shipping, free grocery delivery, a large streaming library on Prime Video, access to Amazon Music and advertising – free Twitch streams, and now an NFL game every week.
If NFL fans prove to be loyal, long-term subscribers and Amazon’s metrics continue to increase, it could even impact the types of programming Amazon invests in for Prime Video. Not only could there be more original NFL programming outside of live games, Amazon could eventually use the momentum to secure exclusive rights to even more sporting events. It’s not entirely unreasonable to imagine Prime Video becoming some sort of full-fledged sports streaming network.
The worst case scenario for Amazon here could be someone buying a Prime subscription and only using it to watch football. It’s probably safe to assume that many of the new subscribers this past week will eventually use Prime for something else that Amazon will benefit from in some way and many people will likely forget to unsubscribe and be charged more again late.
That’s the genius of Amazon’s approach, like it or not. It’s something Apple can’t replicate by streaming baseball games on Apple TV+, which will never be a catch-all, go-to service for the likes of Prime. If even sports fans (a large demographic that likes to spend money) are forced to buy Prime, it’s hard to see how anything else can compete.
Somehow, even though he no longer directly controls the company, Jeff Bezos still finds a way to win.
2023-04-29 21:23:18
#Amazons #big #bet #NFL #quick #win #Prime
