Paul Finebaum: NFL games moving to Amazon Prime will impact college football

Paul Finebaum believes the way we watch live sports is about to undergo a dramatic shift. With Amazon Prime set to broadcast the NFL’s Thursday Night Football starting this season, the ESPN analyst sees streaming services getting a lot more popular among football fans.

Finebaum joined McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning on Monday, where he offered an insider’s take on the situation. With Oklahoma recently striking a deal with ESPN to launch its own channel — SoonerVision — on ESPN+, Finebaum said it could create a domino effect with many programs following suit.

“We’ve just been through a difficult two or three years in this country, and a lot of things that are happening right now we have not encountered in three years,” the ESPN analyst said. “I’ll tell you something that’s going to happen this fall that will really wake people up in relation to the SoonerVision and other things. That’s when you get home from work on Thursday night and you flip on your television and can not find the NFL game because it’s now on Amazon Prime. I think at that point in time, a lot of older people who don’t really want to hear this conversation about digital are going to realize that the future is now the present.”

Amazon went big with its acquisition of Thursday Night Football, bringing on ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit and NBC’s Al Michaels to call the games. The tech giant shelled out $1 billion for exclusive rights, and is set to pay Herbstreit and Michaels more than $10 million each on an annual basis. It marked a first for the NFL, and fans interested in viewing the Thursday game will now be required to pay for an Amazon Prime subscription.

As for the college level, SoonerVision will carry more than 100 live Oklahoma athletic events. That will include one football game each season, some men’s and women’s basketball games, studio shows and archived content. It is also set to carry live Sooners’ home events “that are not picked up by linear channels.”

Finebaum said ESPN has had trouble getting people to subscribe to ESPN+, but is hopeful this new venture can be successful. Either way, with that and the NFL now on Amazon, he expects many holdouts to finally make the switch and pay to stream games.

“I think ultimately, we’re going to make a dramatic move toward that,” Finebaum said. “We’ve heard it where we work for years, but I think it’s been slow to happen from a uniform standpoint. Every time we push programming on (ESPN+) like some of the spring games, we get calls the next day like, ‘How come the game wasn’t on?’ It’s difficult. I’m not trying to act like I’m 16 years old, but being in television for a number of years, you learn these things before the average (person) out there listening.”