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Amazon Wins NFL Bidding With $50M Offer, Limited to Prime Subs

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Twitter, take the bench. The National Football League (NFL) announced Amazon as its partner for Thursday Night Football live streaming during the upcoming 2017 season. While the league didn't divulge the price, Recode says the offer was in the neighborhood of $50 million for the rights to live stream 10 Thursday games nonexclusively. The same games will be available through CBS and NBC, the NFL Network, and Verizon wireless.

Twitter took the Thursday rights last season with a  $10 million bid, and chose to make the streams available even to viewers who didn't have a Twitter account. Amazon will take the opposite approach, limiting access to Amazon Prime subscribers around the world. Recode estimates Prime has 66 million subscribers.

As with the Twitter deal, Amazon has the right to resell some of the ad space during the games, but indicated it may use the spots to promote other video content.

“Our focus is on bringing customers the best premium video programming, when and how they want to watch it," says Jeff Blackburn, senior vice president for business development and entertainment at Amazon. "Streaming Thursday Night Football on Prime Video is a great step for us toward that vision, and offers tremendous new value for Prime members around the world,”

Amazon and the NFL previously partnered on the series All or Nothing, which will soon launch its second season.

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