(Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images)
While Thursday Night Football is always going to suck, this is great news for one reason and one reason only: the end of cable television.
Cable television is going to be the next Blockbuster. Once something we couldn’t live without, it’s become antiquated, expensive, and inconvenient. With all the streaming services out there, people are becoming cord cutters, only paying for streaming services.
However, one of the few things that holds people back from cutting their cords is live sports. It’s why my friends and I still pay for cable. That all started to change last year when the NFL auctioned off the rights to stream some Thursday Night Football games to Twitter for the price of $10 million.
This season, for five times that amount, those rights have gone to Amazon.
Via Reode:
Amazon is paying around $50 million for the 10 games it will show next fall, according to a personfamiliar with the deal. That’s a big increase from the $10 million Twitter paid for last year’s games.
The rest of the deal is roughly similar to the one Twitter had last year: CBS and NBC will each broadcast five games, and Amazon will stream the networks’ coverage, including their ads. Amazon will have the rights to sell a handful of ad slots per game. Amazon says it may sell ads for those slots, but says it will also use them to promote the company’s other video offerings.Amazon won’t have exclusive streaming rights for the games. CBS and NBC will also have the ability to stream the games they broadcast, and Verizon will stream the games to its wireless subscribers.
While the viewership of Thursday night games on CBS and NBC still crushed the Twitter viewership, more games being sold for five times the original cost shows that the demand for streaming games is growing.
And once that wall comes down, say goodnight to cable television.
