Start of 2022 season in NFL brings bigger TV ratings , putting the league and its broadcast partners ahead of last year’s opening weekend.
starring NBC’s Sunday’s Major on Football Night and top-rated
Monday Football Night Over a decade of TV coverage, the league averages about 18 500,000 viewers in seven broadcast windows in the first week. That’s a 3 percent improvement over last year’s opening weekend and the best start to the season since 2020. The league said 121 Millions of people in the U.S. watched at least a few minutes of NFL television between Thursday and Monday.
Sunday night game average between Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Dallas Cowboys 23. 300,000 viewers lead this week’s list. Monday night football brought 18. 84 million viewers – biggest for the series since 18 Viewers – Across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes.
Five of the seven broadcast windows improved from a year ago, with only NBC’s Thursday night Kickoff games and late Sunday afternoon Fox broadcasts were down. Losses there were offset by gains from other games, all of which were up at least 9 percent from last year’s numbers.
Week 2 of the season begins Week 1 Amazon Prime Video Exclusive Thursday Night Football game. NFL communications chief Jeff Miller told reporters Wednesday that the league doesn’t expect the streaming-only games (which will also be shown on local stations in the teams’ home markets) to match last Thursday’s numbers from Fox and the NFL Network, but with the Viewers continue to change their media habits and are looking to the future.
“This is really a long-term strategic decision for the league,” Miller said, likening the Amazon partnership to the NFL’s 2009 brought the game to ESPN when he was only 8 years old. “We don’t have numbers in mind, but our expectation is that the ratings are likely to fall short of Fox [in 2021] ratings. We believe this is the right thing to do in the long run , whether or not that number is what Fox got a year ago.”
Prime Video ran a preseason game in August and averaged about 1.04 million viewers, on par with some NFL Network preseason telecasts. The streamer also hosted an exclusive regular season late in the 2020 season, which was watched by an average of 5.9 million viewers.
