Amazon Prime Scores With Thursday Night Football in Subscription Value Play

Thursday Night Football (TNF) was a good get for Amazon Prime, explaining the astronomical price tag on rights, but it was a kind of “flea flicker” in NFL parlance, moving the real action — attracting more Prime subscribers — downfield at a time of cutbacks and trade downs.

Lending credence to the idea is Bloomberg’s post-game coverage, as it were, stating in a Monday (Sept. 19) article that “Amazon.com Inc.’s broadcast of ‘Thursday Night Football’ attracted a record number of new Prime subscriptions for a three-hour period, beating out events like Cyber Monday and Prime Day.”

That’s the second touchdown for Prime Video this month, with Amazon saying in an early September press release that its eagerly anticipated “Rings of Power” series premiere on Sept. 2 “attracted more than 25 million global viewers on its first day, breaking all previous records, marking the biggest premiere in the history of Prime Video.”

In that release, Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke added that “it is the tens of millions of fans watching.” In an email to PYMNTS, Amazon declined to offer details on subscription growth related to the two latest Amazon Prime Video program offerings.

Read: Amazon Boosts Monetization Effort Ahead of Thursday Night Football Kickoff

However, the underlying strategy is adding value to the core Amazon Prime subscription, hovering in the vicinity of 200 million members in 2022. It’s an end run of sorts that rival services — namely Walmart+ — are finding hard to replicate, though not for lack of trying.

In August Walmart added Paramount+ streaming free with a Walmart+ membership, and on Tuesday (Sept. 20) the big box giant expanded more value adds via its Walmart Connect Innovation Partner Program announcement involving TikTok, Snapchat, Firework, TalkShopLive and Roku.

These moves come at a time of low consumer confidence in the next 18 months or more. The PYMNTS study Consumer Inflation Sentiment: Inflation Slowly Ebbs, But Consumer Outlook Remains Gloomy surveyed nearly 2,170 U.S. consumers, finds that “Many customers have deemed retail goods such as clothing as ‘nice to have’ and are looking to cut back,” with 54% of retail consumers planning to switch from preferred to discount merchants, for example.

Read: Consumer Inflation Sentiment: Inflation Slowly Ebbs, But Consumer Outlook Remains Gloomy

Monetizing the Masses

Amazon’s heavy investments in tentpole video programming are designed in large part to make the Amazon Prime subscription at $14.99 per month, or $139 per year, more attractive. Prime Video as a standalone subscription is $8.99 per month.

As PYMNTS’ Karen Webster wrote on Monday (Sept. 19), in addition to expanding the Amazon Prime retail ecosystem by acquiring members most interested in streaming video, it affords the eCommerce giant more opportunities to monetize those viewers in various ways.

Seeing “enormous potential” to integrate payments into the digital activities that consumers engage in frequently, Webster wrote that “Eighteen of the 37 activities that PYMNTS monitors are those used by consumers to access content or services, but not to make a purchase: watching movies, listening to music, messaging their friends and family, connecting on social networks. Embedding payments and finance into those experiences has the potential to convert the attention of a captive audience of consumers into a commerce experience.”

Read: How to Catch the Next Wave of Digital Transformation

Combined with offers for the budget conscious like Amazon Subscribe & Save with free shipping and its Amazon Prime Rx benefit for Prime members — and viewed in the context of its moves for indie platform sellers announced at the Amazon Accelerate event including Buy With Prime — the platform is clearly creating what it hopes is an irresistible membership that will siphon sales from Walmart and other competitors.

See also: Amazon Accelerate Showcases Buy With Prime, Alexa Integrations