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Prime Video Hits Its Largest NFL Audience Ever With Wild Card Game

rick porter
·2-min read

Amazon’s Prime Video drew its biggest NFL audience to date with a wild card playoff game — although it didn’t quite match past streaming-exclusive matchups. As a whole, the opening weekend of the playoffs is off by about 7 percent compared to last season.

The Baltimore Ravens’ 28-14 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers in primetime Saturday averaged 22.07 million viewers for Prime Video, according to Nielsen. That figure is easily the biggest audience ever for an NFL game on the platform, topping a Dec. 5 matchup between the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers (17.29 million) by almost 5 million viewers.

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The audience peaked at 9 p.m. ET with 24.66 million viewers, the largest concurrent audience ever on Prime Video in the United States. The game as a whole, however, fell a little shy of last year’s streaming-exclusive playoff matchup on Peacock, which averaged 22.86 million viewers in the same Saturday night window. Netflix’s Christmas games earlier this season each topped 24 million viewers.

Fox had the biggest audience for the wild card round, bringing in 35.89 million viewers for its broadcast of the Philadelphia Eagles’ win over the Packers late Sunday afternoon. The game was down about 11 percent from the same window last year (40.16 million for the Packers and Dallas Cowboys, also on Fox).

In primetime Sunday, NBC Sports averaged 29 million viewers (26.2 on the broadcast network and 2.8 million on streaming) for the Washington Commanders’ last-second win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It too was down from last year, falling by 19 percent from 35.8 million viewers.

CBS’ two games ran counter to the downward trend. The network’s Saturday afternoon game between the Houston Texans and Los Angeles Chargers averaged 26.6 million viewers (including an alternate telecast on Nickelodeon), half a million more than the same window on NBC last year. At 1 p.m. ET Sunday, the Buffalo Bills’ dusting of the Denver Broncos brought in 31.2 million viewers, up slightly from the 31.1 million for CBS’ wild card game last year (which was played on a Monday afternoon due to bad weather).

ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 wrapped up the wild card round with 25.34 million viewers for the Los Angeles Rams’ win over the Minnesota Vikings, which was played in Arizona due to the L.A. wildfires. That’s down 13 percent from the Monday night wild card game last year (29.18 million).

Jan. 15, 8:30 a.m. Updated with ratings figures for the CBS and ABC/ESPN games.

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