Amazon 's live - streaming of football games was only a fraction of the figures it publicly claimed . The company is reported to have spent $ 50 m in total acquiring the rights to its first package of sports programming , and claimed that 1.9 million people viewed the first ' Thursday Night Football ' game on their platform . However , the ' viewers ' figure has been challenged as misleading , with a number of journalists pointing out that actual number of people watching for at least 30 seconds on Amazon Prime was just 372,000 . But such analyses are always going to be faulty because the metrics that online and offline marketers use are completely different. This represented just 2.5 % of the programme 's audience , and just 3.5 % of Amazon Prime 's members .
Amazon 's live - streaming of football games was only a fraction of the figures it publicly claimed . The company is reported to have spent $ 50 m in total acquiring the rights to its first package of sports programming , and claimed that 1.9 million people viewed the first ' Thursday Night Football ' game on their platform . However , the ' viewers ' figure has been challenged as misleading , with a number of journalists pointing out that actual number of people watching for at least 30 seconds on Amazon Prime was just 372,000 . This represented just 2.5 % of the programme 's audience , and just 3.5 % of Amazon Prime 's members .