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Big surprise: People like football!

That’s perhaps the biggest takeaway in the aftermath of Amazon’s first real NFL stream, which happened last Thursday night. A huge early season matchup between a couple of Super Bowl contenders — the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers — became the first regular season NFL game to be streamed exclusivelyvia Amazon Prime (or any streaming service, for that matter). Folks in the Kansas City and Los Angeles markets could watch it on over-the-air TV, but in the rest of the country, it was streaming-only.

SEE ALSO:How to watch sports live without cable (or even a TV)

Amazon's stream was a glitzy production with a slick animated intro, a brand new theme song, and two really good teams that produced a superentertaining (and close) game. And, according to the closest thing we have to real metrics, it was a success for Amazon.

Thursday Night Football on Prime (apparently) killed it

According to an internal memo from Prime Video vice president and global head of sports Jay Marine, the Chiefs-Chargers game looked good for Amazon on two fronts.

First, it was supposedly the “most watched night of primetime in the U.S.” in Prime Video’s history. Second, it provided the most sign-ups in a three-hour period Amazon Prime (which costs $140/year) has ever seen. For reference, Prime already had about 200 million global subscribersbeforeall of this, and that's as of last year.

Since these Prime subscription stats were shared by Amazon itself, you should take them with a grain of salt. These are, of course, handpicked metrics that don’t include specific numbers, like exactly how many people signed up on Thursday night. They may not be wrongor false, but they don’t tell the whole story, and nothing will until Nielsenprovides its official ratings. Those have not been published at the time of writing.

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There’s some additional context to consider. For starters, this was the first regular season NFL game that was exclusive to streaming for most Americans. Given how popular football is in the U.S., there could potentially be millions of people who realized that nightthat they needed Prime Video to see the game and signed up out of semi-desperation. I know I needed to have a long phone call with my dad to explain how he could watch the game, though he already had Prime Video at the ready.

Obviously, everyone who feverishly signed up to watch football last week won’t need to do so again for the following 14 weeks of Thursday Night Football on Prime. Amazon won’t be able to boast about those subscription numbers every week. Still, even with this limited information, it’s clear that Amazon made the right call in paying $1 billion per year for the rights to one football game every week. Even if not everyone was happy with the stream quality. (It was mostly flawless for me.)

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A finger in every pie

Tony Gonzales, Charissa Thompson, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Andrew Whitworth, and Richard Sherman on Amazon TNF pregame show

Amazon's pregame show features an all-star lineup including Tony Gonzales and Richard Sherman.Credit: Jamie Squire/Getty Images

It’s possible that Amazon’s Nielsen ratings will be somewhat low for the first TNF game. It would be hard to match or exceed the 17.9 million viewers that last season’s Chiefs-Chargers Thursday night thriller brought in on a combination of network and cable TV, per Sports Business Journal. But even if the numbers aren’t quite there now, Amazon has this deal for another 11 years. They will come in due time.

And that’s fine because Amazon probably doesn’t care that much about raw viewership ratings, beyond what it needs to give to ad buyers. Each new Prime subscriber represents potentially $140 upfront for the company and Prime has become an essential service for many because of all the different perks it offers: free shipping, free grocery delivery, a large streaming library on Prime Video, access to Amazon Music and ad-free Twitch streams, and now one NFL game every week.