Amazon’s ‘Thursday Night Football’ coverage to be tracked by Nielsen

The deal marks the first time Nielsen will include ratings from a streaming service in its closely watched weekly television-viewing report, whose data is crucial for determining the value of commercial time. Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service has exclusive rights to the National Football League’s Thursday matchups starting this coming season, and the company has told advertisers its coverage would get a big audience.

“Our collaboration with Nielsen will allow us to provide advertisers with familiar campaign measurements to make apples-to-apples comparisons," Srishti Gupta, Amazon Ads director of media measurement, said.

The three-year deal between Amazon and Nielsen will start in September, when the new NFL season kicks off, the companies said.

“This is a huge testament to the role Nielsen plays," said Deirdre Thomas, the ratings firm’s managing director of U.S. audience-measurement product sales. “It demonstrates the importance of our ratings in the media ecosystem."

Nielsen has faced criticism in recent years over the accuracy of its ratings measurements and for not keeping pace with all the different platforms on which viewers watch content.

To measure Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football," Nielsen will rely on a panel of 42,000 homes that it uses to measure traditional broadcast and cable channels. Initially, Nielsen will primarily measure Amazon viewership on TV sets. Nielsen will also track audiences on mobile phones, tablets, and laptops, Ms. Thomas said.

Amazon also will provide advertisers with its own viewing data for the Thursday Night games, Ms. Gupta said.

Amazon struck a deal with the NFL last year to carry “Thursday Night Football" for 11 seasons at $1.2 billion a season, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

While Amazon has streamed “Thursday Night Football" for several years, the games were also available on Fox Corp.’s Fox broadcast network and the NFL’s own cable channel. Last season, Thursday Night Football had a total audience of 16.4 million viewers a game across Fox, the NFL Network and Prime Video. That was a 16% increase from the previous season.

Amazon, which said 80 million households have Prime Video, has told advertisers it projects an average audience of 12.6 million viewers a game for its 15 games this season, according to media buyers. A person familiar with Prime Video’s thinking said the platform expects a transition period as viewers migrate from traditional TV to the service for the games.

Despite anticipating a smaller audience than last season, Prime Video has been aggressive in its pricing of “Thursday Night Football" to advertisers, people familiar with the matter said. Amazon was seeking much more for ad time on its platform than what advertisers paid for Thursday night games that ran on Fox, ad buyers said.

Amazon eventually lowered its ad prices, but the delay caused some advertisers to spend less money with Amazon since they had locked in their NFL ad deals with TV networks, some of the buyers said.

An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on the company’s ad sales for “Thursday Night Football."

Besides its investment in rights to the games, Amazon has spent heavily wooing talent to cover them. Legendary broadcaster Al Michaels will handle play-by-play for Prime Video’s games, with ESPN college-football broadcaster Kirk Herbstreit providing color commentary.

To reach Prime Video viewers who might not be typical NFL fans, Amazon also plans to offer different, simultaneous feeds. The company earlier this month said one will be hosted by Dude Perfect, a sports-comedy team known for performing trick shots and challenges.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text