Amazon spends big on streaming rights for Thursday night NFL games

Last year, Twitter made a deal with the National Football League (NFL) that allowed it to live-stream 10 Thursday night games. Twitter reportedly wanted to make the same deal this year as well but lost in a bidding war against Amazon.

The online retail giant has recently inked a deal with the NFL in an attempt to attract more Prime members. The company has bought the rights to stream 10 Thursday night games, which only Prime members will be able to watch. As part of the agreement, the games will also be broadcasted on TV by CBS and NBC.

Amazon and Twitter weren’t the only two companies that showed interest in working with the NFL though. Both Facebook and Google’s YouTube also tried to make a deal but didn’t have much luck. Amazon will reportedly pay the NFL around $50 million for the 10 games, which is five times as much as Twitter paid last year.

On average, the NFL games that were streamed on Twitter last year attracted 243,000 visitors. It is likely that Amazon can expect a lot less viewers, based on the fact that it doesn’t have nearly as many users as Twitter. For comparison reasons, the same games that were broadcast live on CBS and NBC averaged 15.8 million viewers.

With the new deal, Amazon’s Prime membership just became a little more interesting, but only for all you football fans out there. It is possible that we’ll see more deals like these in the future that could bring sports like basketball, hockey, and others to Amazon or other websites like YouTube and Facebook, among others.