The NFL will nearly double its media revenues to more than $ 10 billion per season with new rights deals announced Thursday, including a deal with Amazon Prime Video that will give the streaming service exclusive rights to “Thursday Night Football” from 2022.
The league took in $ 5.9 billion a year with its current contracts. It will get $ 113 billion over the 11 seasons of the new deals starting in 2023, an 80% increase from the previous period, a person with direct knowledge of the contracts told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the money figures were not made public.
Amazon has partnered with the league to stream games on Thursday nights since 2017, but it will take over the entire package from Fox, which it has had since 2018 after CBS and NBC shared the package for two seasons. Amazon last year streamed a Saturday week 16 game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Arizona Cardinals, which was seen by an estimated 11.2 total viewers and had an average minute audience of 4.8 million. That was a record for the largest audience to stream an NFL game.
Games will air on CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN, while ABC will have a limited schedule of games, returning to the Super Bowl rotation (two games) for the first time since the 2005 season. ESPN’s deal was set to expire after 2021, while the others expired a year later, but ESPN has a bridge agreement for 2022.
With the exception of Amazon, the new deals will start with the 2023 season and end after the 2033 schedule. Games on Amazon will also be broadcast on radio stations in the cities of the participating teams, which is also the case with games broadcast on ESPN and NFL Network.
In addition to the two Super Bowls, ESPN and ABC will also receive flex game rights to “Monday Night Football,” a right previously only granted to NBC when flex scheduling was introduced in 2006.
The contract also expands digital rights to the other networks. ESPN + will air one of the London games and NBC’s “Peacock” platform will also have exclusive games.
With the hefty new contracts, the 32 NFL teams and their players can look forward to higher salary caps throughout the decade. The ceiling has been lowered by nearly $ 16 million this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The broadcaster partners also think they will likely get an extra game per season from this year. NFL owners are gearing up to implement a regular 17-game season.
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