Not Paying For That
The second week of the NFL regular season wraps up tonight, and it marked the first Thursday night game produced by Amazon Prime Video under an 11-year contract which nets the league a billion dollars a year…just for the single weekly Thursday night game. And Amazon doesn’t even get all of those; the season kickoff and Thanksgiving games stay with NBC.
You can’t watch the Thursday night game, though, unless you are an Amazon Prime Video member at a cost of about $10 per month. And that led to folks complaining about the weekend-opening prime time game not being on free over-the-air TV.
If the refrain about “football ought to be available to everyone, not just the rich” sounds familiar…it’s because we heard the same thing 40 years ago when a weekly game was placed on cable channel ESPN and not on free TV.
And we heard the same thing in more recent years when the college football championship was on ESPN…and the college basketball championship Final Four aired on TBS in alternate years.
First, as you can tell, the world did not come to an end with some of the games not being on free TV. Second, very few people truly have free TV anymore; sure, you may watch an ABC affiliate like KCRG-TV9, but it’s pretty likely you’re doing it as part of a paid cable or satellite TV package and not with an antenna.
Too soon to tell if moving marquee sporting events to paid streaming services will be a growing trend. But that move more than two generations ago helped solidify cable as a nearly-required element in homes. Those who have bet a lot on streaming services are hoping that lightning strikes twice.
In the meantime, there will be plenty of folks who wake up on Friday mornings and hear a sportscast with a Thursday night NFL score included and say, “oh, that’s right…they still play games on Thursdays, don’t they?”
