From Recode:

Last year, the National Football League experimented by letting Twitter livestream 10 Thursday night games.

This year, pro football will continue the test, but will switch it up: Amazon has bought the rights to the league’s streaming package, and will offer the games for free to its Amazon Prime subscribers around the world.

Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube had also expressed interest in carrying the games this year.

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.

Few things:

  1. Amazon makes the most sense. I never understood the Twitter deal. No one is logging on to Twitter and expecting to watch live longform video (you can’t just hop into a football game for a play or two and hop out). It felt like a novelty all along. The Apple TV Twitter app, which included a Tweet stream along with the game, was cute, but again, didn’t really present a better alternative to watching the game through broadcast TV. People are already going to Amazon Prime Video expecting to see longer form programming, and dumping an NFL game in front of their faces, even if it is technically available for free over-the-air or through the NBC and CBS apps (I believe those require cable credentials), allows the NFL to grab a younger demo that spends most of its “TV” viewing time in Amazon and Netflix apps.
  2. You’ve got to love Amazon. They don’t care about churning a profit and just want market share. All of it. They want everything. So who cares if they drop 50 mil on shitty Thursday NFL games? They now get to tell their users that along with a streaming library quickly approaching that of Netflix, they can also rent and buy new movies, listen to music, get FREE two-day shipping, and watch NFL games… and then Amazon uses those games to promote their other content (this actually isn’t much different from what the networks do– they just about break even on the NFL and use it to promote their other shows). Brilliant! Prime is quickly becoming the greatest deal in modern history. I couldn’t have imagined watching an entire NFL game on Twitter last year, but I certainly could envision doing so through Amazon, especially if I choose to stream it on my iPad– I’d just rather use Amazon’s app over NBC’s, and certainly over Twitter’s clunky interface, which wanted its feed, and not the game, to dominate the screen. Hey, let’s pay $10 million for NFL rights and focus the user experience on missives from people you don’t know. I can’t imagine why Twitter’s stock is tanking. Meanwhile, Amazon is about to own the world.
  3. For me, Prime is quickly taking over Netflix. I wouldn’t say it’s there yet, but I find the mix of new movies (which you have to pay for) and their free streaming content, and in some cases categorization, more pleasing than what Netflix offers. Now, when I go to Netflix, it’s for a specific show. Prime sometimes just feels more approachable.
  4. Thursday night games still suck.