It would be interesting that the League is so set on letting Thursday Night Football being the guinea pig in this situation, but it’s widely known that the telecast is one of the reasons why everybody railed on the NFL’s ratings last season, since an abundance of dull gridiron contests had primetime audiences tuning into Big Bang Theory and other non-football programming of the evening.
I can’t imagine that Amazon’s audiences will immediately make a significant difference to the viewership averages, but part of the point is to be successful enough to take on more games next year.
Interestingly, Twitter was one of the first companies to make a big streaming deal, but it was only for two games and was more of a prototype process than something indicative of the NFL’s future online.