If Thanksgiving Day football isn’t enough, Amazon and the NFL hope to start a new tradition by broadcasting a Black Friday football game beginning next year (via Deadline). The game will take place on November 24th, 2023, at 3 PM ET, but the teams have yet to be determined.
It’s no coincidence that the game will be available on Prime Video on Black Friday. According to Hans Schroeder, NFL Media’s chief operating officer, “Amazon is uniquely positioned” to partner with the NFL on Black Friday because it is “one of the most important days of the year for their business.”
After signing a 10-year deal with the NFL in March 2021, the e-commerce giant successfully streamed its first Thursday Night Football game last month. So far, Amazon has aired five games, with Nielsen Media Research reporting that the games averaged 10.8 million viewers, a 48 percent increase over the first five Thursday Night Football games in 2021.
Amazon is also said to have made a bid for NFL Sunday Ticket rights. DirecTV has owned these rights for nearly 30 years, and the final football season of streaming has been difficult for fans. On opening weekend, the company’s website and app crashed, and subscribers reported problems in the weeks that followed. Disney, ESPN’s parent company, has also made a bid for Sunday Ticket, as has Apple, which has begun airing Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV Plus.
Sports streaming has become an increasingly fragmented industry, and the addition of streaming services has only complicated matters. It can be difficult to know where to watch certain games now that they are distributed across linear television and streaming services. This issue has even piqued the interest of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who urged Apple to allow a potentially historic Yankees game to be broadcast on cable, which Amazon later did on the YES cable network, which it partially owns.
