Jay Marine: Last News

Prime Video scored big in the season debut of Thursday Night Football. The Philadelphia Eagles’ 34-28 victory last night over the Minnesota Vikings drew 16.6 million viewers across all media platforms, setting a Prime Video record as the most-streamed NFL game ever on the service.

UPDATE: Marie Donoghue is the new Chief Business & Growth Officer at gaming company DraftKings.

Marie Donoghue, the VP of global sports video at Amazon’s Prime Video, is leaving the company.

Prime Video executives aren’t prepared to guarantee a ratings bonanza with the first NFL game on Black Friday. They mainly hope it succeeds in seeding a new annual pop culture event on the day after Thanksgiving.

Amazon’s Hail Mary play to bring the NFL to streaming looks like a touchdown in Week 1.

“While we’re still waiting for official Nielsen ratings, our measurement shows that the audience numbers exceeded all of our expectations for viewership,” Prime Video’s top sports exec Jay Marine said today in a note to staff on the “resounding success” of the streamer’s official Thursday Night Football kickoff on September 15.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor There will be lots of teams worth following this NFL season, be they the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the returning Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams. Even so, many people in the media business have their eyes on a very distinctive player: Amazon Prime Video. The streamer, which once shared “Thursday Night Football” games with Fox, now has exclusive rights to that action and must convince some pigskin Luddites to plug into broadband. Streaming “Thursday Night Football,” after all, will require a different kind of remote — and familiarity with a home screen, not a cable box. “It is going to be a behavioral shift for people,” acknowledges Jay Marine, VP of Prime Video and its global head of sports. “Our job is to make sure they are able to find ‘Thursday Night Football’ at its new home and make it as easy as possible to get into the Prime Video app and start streaming.”

Amazon and Sky have signed a “long-term partnership” that will see Amazon Prime Video launch on Sky and Now TV devices across Europe from today, while Now TV and Sky Ticket will be carried on Fire TV.