Thursday Night Football

Thursday Night Football (commonly abbreviated as TNF) is the branding used for broadcasts of National Football League (NFL) games that broadcast primarily on Thursday nights. Most of the games kick off at 8:15 Eastern Time (8:20 prior to 2022 and 8:25 prior to 2018). Debuting on November 23, 2006, the telecasts were originally part of NFL Network's Run to the Playoffs package, which consisted of eight total games broadcast on Thursday and Saturday nights (five on Thursdays, and three on Saturdays, originally branded as Saturday Night Football) during the latter portion of the season. Since 2012, the TNF package has begun during the second week of the NFL season; the NFL Kickoff Game and the NFL on Thanksgiving are both broadcast as part of NBC Sports' Sunday Night Football contract and are not included in Thursday Night Football. In 2014, the NFL shifted the package to a new model to increase its prominence. The entire TNF package would be produced by a separate rightsholder, who would hold rights to simulcast a portion of the package on their respective network. Networks have included CBS, NBC and Fox. In 2016, the NFL also began to sub-license digital streaming rights to the broadcast television portion of the package to third-parties, beginning with Twitter in 2016, and Amazon in 2017—initially on Prime Video, and since 2018 it is also being carried freely on Amazon-owned live streaming platform Twitch. In 2021, it was announced that Amazon had acquired the exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football beginning in the 2023 season under the NFL's new broadcasting deals, marking the first time that the NFL had sold one of its main television packages to a digital media company. As before, all of the games are also streamed for free on Twitch, and aired on local broadcast television stations in the markets of the opposing teams as per NFL rules. As with all other nationally televised games, they are also carried on radio as part of the NFL on Westwood One Sports package. At the end of the 2025 season, Amazon announced an average of 15 million viewers had watched each game throughout the schedule, the highest on record.