Amazon’s Black Friday NFL Game Is a Play to Keep You Paying for Prime
Enjoy the leftover turkey, click “add to cart”—and forget about that $139 annual fee.
On Black Friday, Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service will carry an NFL game between the Las Vegas Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs. It will be the second edition in what the league and Amazon want to make into a new holiday tradition. Both the NFL and the tech giant are hoping the Raiders and Chiefs can put on a better show than the Miami Dolphins and New York Jets did last year, when the Dolphins pounded the Jets 34-13 in front of 80,000 hushed fans at MetLife Stadium. Amazon.com Inc. paid the league about $100 million for the rights to that sad spectacle, an eye-popping figure for three hours of programming—about what it cost Prime to produce two seasons of the detective series Bosch.
For the world’s largest online retailer, however, the NFL on Black Friday isn’t just another show: It’s a way to insinuate itself in the life of millions of Americans on one of the biggest shopping days of the year. The Black Friday game is a showcase for Amazon’s broader strategy in sports and its leading laboratory in a long-term project to meld content and commerce in a way that will shape the viewing experience for fans—and the financial fate of leagues—for decades to come.