By AI Creative Media
Amazon will be streaming Thursday night NFL games this year, beating Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for the streaming rights. Last year, NFL live-streamed 10 Thursday night games on Twitter for free. But this time, you will be needing an Amazon Prime subscribers to watch it, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“We’re focused on bringing our customers what they want to watch, Prime members want the NFL,” Amazon senior vice president Jeff Blackburn told the Wall Street Journal.
Setting Amazon apart is that their service already have many paying subscribers, who also get access to its library of movies and TV shows, many of which are originals. Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter are all free to their users, which means advertising is their primary source of revenue from the NFL live streaming.
According to Business Insider early this year, there are 65 million Prime members worldwide. The deal could potentially help Amazon not only retain that number but also improve on it with gains of new NFL subscribers.
It remains to been how much benefit a digital live stream will benefit NFL and, inversely how NFL will improve Amazon’s streaming platform. So, similar to Twitter last year, the one year deal for NFL’s move to Amazon seems like a good match for both sides to test the waters.