The NFL wants Thursday Night Football on Amazon to be a success. The league will do all it can to help. That is why the streaming giant’s first full season of Thursday games may be the best midweek schedule the league has ever put together.

The entire 2022 schedule will be released on Thursday night with primetime specials on both ESPN2 and NFL Network. According to Mike Florio, when it is, fans will see that all 14 playoff teams from 2021 will have at least one appearance on Amazon this season.

During the NFL Draft, Roger Goodell announced that the Chargers and the Chiefs will meet in Week 2, the first game on Amazon’s schedule. That is a pretty good start to the company’s 11-year deal with the NFL that reportedly pays the league $1 billion per year.

The commissioner is excited about what is possible with the deal. “Amazon’s platform is going to allow us to do things that we’ve only dreamed about to date,” he said last week at an Amazon conference according to Front Office Sports.

He did not elaborate on what some of those things may be. Certainly technology for covering a game will be in play, but the reality is that the things Goodell has “only dreamed about to date” may have more to do with advertising and revenue generation. Amazon is one of the world’s top retail sellers after all.

ESPN has to be happy with the performance of ESPN+ thus far. During Disney’s latest quarterly earnings report, the company revealed that the streaming platform added another 1 million subscribers during the second quarter of 2022. That brings the total to around 22.3 million.

Disney generates an average of $4.73 from each ESPN+ subscriber in monthly revenue. It is part of the cash cow that streaming has been for the entire Walt Disney Company. Disney+, the company’s flagship OTT streamer, added 7.9 million subscribers during the same time period.

Don’t expect this to mean that Disney and ESPN are ready to abandon traditional cable. Bob Chapek, Disney’s CEO, described linear networks as still being “cash generators”. He added that “the hesitancy to move too fast away from those is really a cashflow situation.”

“At some point, when it is going to be good for our shareholders, we will be able to fully go,” Chapek said. “It will be the ultimate fan offering that appeals to super-fans of sports, and it is really only ESPN that could pull that off.”

FOX Sports has its future number one NFL analyst in Tom Brady, but the network has taken issue with the figures reported on the deal.

Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk reported that a FOX spokesperson reached out to Andrew Marchand of the New York Post saying there were inaccuracies in his report.

“What has been reported isn’t an accurate description of the deal and we have not released details beyond what was disclosed on our quarterly earnings call,” spokesman Brian Nick told Marchand, who broke the story of Brady’s next career.

Marchand said Nick didn’t specifically say what was inaccurate. The reporter is standing by his reporting.

Although FOX hasn’t formally announced Brady’s deal, the terms are believed to be 10 years, $375 million.