The National Football League is on the verge of signing new rights agreements with media partners that Amazon.com Inc. people familiar with the matter have many games exclusively and TV networks pay as much as double their current rate.
New agreements may already be in place next week, the people said. The television offerings for the league’s Sunday and Monday franchises with Fox, CBS, NBC and ESPN are likely to last as long as 11 years, they said.
The ESPN agreement will take effect after the 2021-22 season, while the Fox, CBS and NBC agreements will begin after the 2022-23 season.
An agreement with Amazon will result in a significant number of Thursday night games exclusively on its Prime Video platform and represent the league’s deepest incident in the stream, some people said. These games would not be available on traditional television outside the local markets of the two teams playing, they said.
Amazon has become an aggressive bidder for sports rights here and abroad. The company already has a relationship with the NFL, as it has had streaming rights for football on Thursday night since 2017. The games were also broadcast by the league-owned NFL Network, and more recently by the Fox Network, whose parent Fox Corp. ownership with News Corp., the parent company of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co.