What's The Spread?

With live sports available across multiple platforms and devices, the question of audience and viewership naturally comes up. This is a particular question in NFL programming, where Amazon live-streamed a series of Thursday Night Football games earlier this season.

Many marketers have asked: To what degree are audiences viewing NFL games on the Amazon streaming platform vs. viewing on linear TV? To help answer this question, VAB analyzed the viewership figures of seven Amazon-streamed Thursday night NFL games and compared their average audience size and engagement (minutes viewed) to the linear TV audience for those same games.

Here are the 3 Insights Essentials from What’s The Spread? For additional detail and insights, download the full insights report.

1. More access across more devices = more viewership overall.  Audience was up for both Amazon streaming and linear TV this year vs. last.
   
   
2. Linear TV dominates.  On average, the linear TV audience was 24x the size of the Amazon streaming audience. To see the relative audience scale, including what percentage Amazon’s audience is of linear TV’s, check out page 6.
   
   
3. Deeper viewer engagement with linear TV. The average linear viewer spent 51% more time watching each game than the Amazon streamer. To learn how many minutes each viewer spent, on average, watching each platform, check out page 9.

For more detail on the individual games as well as year-over-year trends, download the report, What’s The Spread.