What Amazon's NFL success means for the Pac-12

The NFL had great success last Thursday for their first game streamed by Amazon

After all the dust has been settled, we have now learned that Amazon was able to bring in a huge amount of viewers for last Thursday's Chiefs/Chargers game. 

According to Nielsen, who is responsible for tracking the audience data, the game averaged about 13 million views during its live stream. Not only were their a ton of viewers, but Amazon also reported that it saw record number of Prime signups in the three-hour period of the game, which topped the new subscriber additions on Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

This is significant news for the Pac-12, a conference who is currently in limbo and trying to figure out which media rights deal is the best for them. As more comes out such as the reports that I talked about last week, ESPN is missing the Pac-12's desired offer mark by hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Something that 247Sports' Jason Scheer, reported back in July, when he explained the amount of money initially offered by ESPN per school was $24.5 million. A mark that the Pac-12 wants to be much higher as according to Front Office Sports, they are hoping for a deal that would allow it to increase its per-school payout, which was nearly $33 million in 2020.

Now there are plenty of reasons that ESPN is "low-balling" the Pac-12, and when you think about the struggles the conference has had it's not even a case of being low-balled. Larry Scott's tenure was nothing short of a disaster in terms of creating revenue opportunities, and ensuring the happiness of every school. Something that could have helped prevent the departure of USC and UCLA. There is also the fact that without USC, the conference doesn't have that marquee brand to sell. The one thing they do offer is the fact that they play in the later time slots. 

This puts a lot of pressure on Washington, Utah, and even Oregon to succeed this season because they need to show the conference still has value despite USC's departure. Yes, USC hasn't accomplished much recently but they similar to Texas leaving the Big 12 are viewed as a major brand being lost. 

So, back to the Amazon success and what it does for the Pac-12. There is clearly viewership potential considering how many people subscribed last week, and in total as Amazon has over 200 million subscribers. However, it is hard to compare two of the NFL's premier teams playing the only Thursday night game, to what will end up being Olympic sports and 36 football games of Pac-12 play. There is just no way that the Pac-12 will generate the viewership the NFL did last week, but Amazon would most likely be banking on more Pac-12 fans to subscribe in order to have easier access to Pac-12 games.

Something that cannot be said about the Pac-12 Networks, and appears to be one of George Kliavkoff's main focuses in negotiating. He expressed to John Canzano and Jon Wilner in a podcast interview a couple days ago:

“Certainly revenue is at the top of the priority list but we have to also balance that against distribution,” Kliavkoff said. “We really want our content to be available to any of our fans who want to see it. I’ve set a goal that our content should be available to any piece of glass connected to the internet as part of our next media rights negotiation.”

Getting a deal with Amazon would almost certainly have a ton of value for the conference, and would also guarantee accessibility for the Pac-12's fans. Whether it ends up being with Amazon or even Apple who has been streaming a ton of sports, the Pac-12 needs all of their games to be somewhere where fans are. That could even mean a deal with ESPN circles around, and we see ESPN buying all the Pac-12 Networks content for ESPN+. Regardless, Amazon's success last week provided a couple positives for the Pac-12. There is a market for people watching games through Amazon, and Amazon is definitely valuing how many people subscribe in comparison to views. 

So, if Amazon feels that adding the Pac-12 will bring in more subscribers, they may very well fell confident enough to give the Pac-12 the money they desire.