Amazon has made it very clear that it is investing in live sports — and it just picked up a huge win during its first airing of the new NFL season.
Amazon's (AMZN) -) "Thursday Night Football" broadcast of the Week 2 matchup between the Minnesota Vikings and Philadelphia Eagles saw an average of 15 million viewers on Amazon Prime.
That was the largest NFL audience of Prime, which made its debut last year with a matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers that saw an average of 13 million viewers.
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Amazon said that last year's opener also drove its "biggest three hours of U.S. Prime sign-ups ever."
However, it remains to be seen whether Amazon's growth will be sustainable as the season trucks along.
Amazon only ended up averaging 9.6 million viewers for the 15 games it aired last year. According to Insider, this was 25% lower than estimates and forced the tech company to compensate advertisers to make up for the gap.
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Insider also reported that advertisers would likely give Amazon a "pass" given it was the inaugural season for the tech giant to broadcast NFL games.
One of the likely factors to the viewership decline last season was actually the relatively poor schedule of games that played on Thursday night.
Amazon saw viewership of at least 11 million during its first three broadcasts, each of which featured at least one team that would eventually make the playoffs.
What followed were consecutive weeks featuring two underperforming teams, which saw the numbers fall below 10 million viewers for three weeks straight. After the first three broadcasts, Amazon never hit over 11 million viewers again for the rest of the season.
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