Earlier this week the National Football League announced that their "Thursday Night Football" games will air exclusively on Amazon Prime starting in 2022. The projected date is a year earlier than they originally announced, and is a historic step in watching national sports on a streaming service.

There are 15 games, and one pre-season game scheduled for Thursday nights in 2022, marking the first time a package will air entirely on the streaming platform. Amazon has been streaming the games since 2017, but they will have the exclusive rights beginning next year, which is a year earlier than anticipated. The date was moved up due to the FOX Network agreeing to abandon their deal a year early.

According to CNBC, Amazon is paying a whopping $1 billion a year to exclusively stream the football games outside of local broadcast networks, and they have signed an 11-year agreement. This marks the first time a streaming platform will provide the games, and matches the packages acquired by Disney, Comcast, Viacom/CBS, and FOX. CNBC stated that in April 2021 Amazon founder, CEO, and Chairman Jeff Bezos said that the company had surpassed 200 million global Prime subscribers.

Forcing football fans to subscribe to a streaming service to watch games could be the wave of the future, but they might have just lost some die-hard Saints fans at my house. Just sayin'.

 

 

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