Thursday Night Football scores uptick despite MLB competition

The following article " Thursday Night Football scores uptick despite MLB competition " originally appeared on Sports Media Watch .

Some strong baseball competition did little to slow Thursday Night Football , which scored its top Week 5 audience since moving to Amazon.

The latest edition of NFL Thursday Night Football — the Falcons’ overtime win over the Buccaneers — averaged 12.30 million viewers on Amazon Prime Video, up 5% from Bears-Commanders last year (11.72M) and the most-watched Week 5 edition of TNF since it last aired on broadcast television three years ago (Rams-Seahawks: 14.76M).

TNF has now posted consecutive year-over-year increases after opening the season with back-to-back declines. While Thursday’s game was the least-watched of the young season on TNF , it continued a streak of four-straight games with at least 12 million viewers — the longest of the Amazon era.

Atlanta’s win, which peaked with 13.88 million viewers in the 9:30 PM ET quarter-hour, dominated a competitive night of television that included the winner-take-all Mets-Brewers Major League Baseball playoff game on ESPN (4.02M). Last year’s game faced no such competition.

TNF is now averaging 14.17 million viewers this season, up 5% from the same point last season (13.54M) and the highest average at this point of the season since 2015. (Keep in mind during its broadcast network era, TNF typically kicked off its season with a couple of games exclusively on NFL Network.) Its median age of 47.5 remains considerably younger than the other NFL broadcasters (54.7), though slightly grayer than the same point last year (47).

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