The start of the 2022 NFL season brought higher ratings on television, putting the league and its broadcast partners ahead of last year’s opening weekend.
Directed by Big Melody for NBC Sunday night football and the most seen Monday night football For more than a decade, the league averaged 18.5 million viewers in the first week of its seven broadcast windows. That’s a 3% improvement from last year’s first weekend and the best start to the season since 2016. The league says 121 million people in the United States watch at least a few minutes of NFL broadcasts between Thursday and Monday.
Sunday night’s game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Dallas Cowboys topped the week’s lineup with an average of 23.3 million viewers. Monday night football drew 19.84 million viewers, the highest ratings for the franchise since 2009, on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes.
Five of the seven broadcast windows improved their numbers from a year earlier, with only NBC’s opening game on Thursday night and Fox’s late-afternoon broadcast on Sunday. Losses were offset by gains in other games, which were up at least 9% from last year.
The second week of the season will see the first Thursday night football An Amazon Prime Video exclusive game. The league does not expect broadcast-only games (which are also broadcast on local stations in the teams’ home markets) to match Fox and NFL Network’s Thursday numbers last year, the boss told reporters Wednesday. . Looking to the future. as viewers continue to change their media habits.
“This is really a long-term strategic decision for the league,” Miller said, comparing Amazon’s partnership with the NFL, which brought games to ESPN, then eight years old, in 1987. “We don’t have a number on mind, but our expectation is that the ratings will not match what Fox has achieved. [in 2021]. We think this is right in the long run, regardless of whether the number is what Fox got a year ago. “
Prime Video aired a preseason game in August that averaged 1.04 million viewers, in line with some of the NFL Network’s preseason shows. The streamer also had a regular season exclusive game at the end of the 2020 season, averaging 5.9 million viewers.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
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