Amazon plans to stream a Black Friday NFL game starting in 2023

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

If Thanksgiving Day football isn’t enough, Amazon and the NFL want to create a new tradition by airing a Black Friday football game starting next year (via Deadline). The game will take place on November 24th, 2023, at 3PM ET, but it’s too soon to know which teams will be playing.

Airing the game on Prime Video on Black Friday isn’t a coincidence, either. Hans Schroeder, the chief operating officer for NFL Media, says “Amazon’s uniquely positioned” to partner with the NFL on Black Friday because it’s “one of the most important days of the year for their business.”

The e-commerce giant successfully streamed its first Thursday Night Football game last month after securing a 10-year deal with the NFL in March 2021. Amazon has aired five total games so far, with data from Nielsen Media Research stating the games averaged 10.8 million viewers, a 48 percent increase from the first five Thursday Night Football games in 2021.

Amazon has also reportedly placed a bid to gain the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket. DirecTV has held onto these rights for nearly 30 years, and its final football season of streaming has been a bit rough for fans. The company’s website and app crashed on opening weekend, and subscribers reported issues in the weeks that followed. ESPN’s parent company Disney has also placed a bid to secure Sunday Ticket and so has Apple, which started airing Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV Plus.

Sports streaming has become an increasingly fractured business, and throwing in streaming services has only made things more complicated. Now that various games are split across linear television and streaming services, it can be difficult to know where to watch certain games. This issue has even caught the attention of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who pushed Apple to allow for a potentially historic Yankees game to air on cable, which Amazon later did on the YES cable network it partially owns.