Thursday Night Football is switching over to Fox for the next five seasons.
According to ESPN's Darren Rovell, Fox has paid more than $3 billion for the rights to broadcast the NFL's Thursday Night Football games.
NBC and CBS have split coverage of the league's Thursday night games over the past two seasons, which came at a cost of $45 million for each game. Airing 11 games on Thursday nights for the next five seasons from Week 4 to Week 15, not including Thanksgiving night, is reportedly worth an average of more than $660 million a year - meaning the new deal with Fox values each game at an average of more than $60 million.
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The NFL's television ratings dropped 9.7% this season, according to numbers registered by Nielsen. The drop in ratings comes one season after the NFL saw their numbers fall 8%. According to Rovell, a typical NFL game during the 2017 season was watched by 1.6 million fewer people than compared to last season; 14.9 million vs. 16.5 million.
However, it wasn't all that bad for the NFL in the 2017 season.
Both NBC and ESPN had the most watched shows in every single week (in terms of audience and in all key male demographics) for every Sunday Night and Monday Night Football game this season. Furthermore, NBC's Sunday Night Football was #1 in primetime this fall for the seventh consecutive year. The 18.2 million viewers topped the second best primetime show, Thursday Night Football on CBS, by 29%.
