scored its largest audience since moving to streaming with the opening game of the 2023 season.
The Philadelphia Eagles’ 34-28 win over the Minnesota Vikings averaged 15.05 million viewers on Amazon’s Prime Video and local broadcast channels in the teams’ home markets, according to Nielsen. That’s the largest audience, at about 2 million viewers, since the weekday NFL showcase moved to Prime Video last year and up 15.5 percent from the previous high of 13.03 million for last year’s opener.
And according to a custom report that integrates first-party streaming data with Nielsen’s national panel figures, the game averaged 16.6 million viewers across all platforms (including Twitch and NFL digital properties) and including computers and mobile devices.
TNF averaged about 9.6 million viewers in the Nielsen ratings last season, slightly lower than previous years when broadcasts aired on Fox and the NFL Network (the latter having a handful of exclusive games). Amazon’s own figures for the games, which combine its own data with Nielsen figures, were slightly higher, but advertising activity for the games is driven by Nielsen figures.
Nielsen planned to include some first-hand data Thursday night football‘s national ratings this season, but delayed implementation of the combined numbers after criticism from other NFL broadcasters and an industry trade group, as well as the fact that the plan still had to receive approval from the Media Rating Council, a regulatory body that accredits media measuring companies.
The higher number for Thursday’s game is what Nielsen calls a custom integrated livestream report. It combines Nielsen’s panel-based measurements with Amazon’s first-party audience signal data collected from connected TV devices.
