According to SVB MoffettNathanson, “Thirdday Night Football”‘s move to Amazon Prime Video is concealing the fact that the sport’s audience is still growing, and remains an important part of network television. Analyst Michael Nathanson said that football’s average viewership declined by 4% during the 2022–23 season, but that the decline was due to a sharp drop in viewers of Thursday night games. Except for Thursday nights, ratings were actually up 1% from the previous season due to an increase in the number of people watching Sunday games on CBS and Fox. And it comes with a 9% jump in viewership during the 2021-22 football season, he said. “With the NFL making up 82 of the top 100 telecasts in 2022, it’s clear that sports (and the NFL in particular) remain the glue for the linear bundle,” Nathanson wrote in a research note Friday. “For now, that glue remains as sticky as ever.” It’s a major reason why events like the Super Bowl still matter, and why the cost of a 30-second commercial continues to climb. Some coveted 30-second time slots earned over $7 million during the big game this year. Nathanson said the decline is the biggest single driver of NFL Network ratings during the TV season — and ultimately advertising dollars. They looked at NFL games and shoulder programming—before and after the games—and found that it made up more than half (55%) of Fox’s total live audience on the same day. “Meanwhile, the NFL represented a significant but relatively consistent portion of CBS (32%), NBC (31%) and ESPN (28%) total time during the 2022 football season,” he said. “Thus, we remain in an era where NFL ratings really do matter, especially as networks move high-profile entertainment content and tertiary sports rights to their affiliated sister streaming platforms.” CBS and Fox are home to the league’s Sunday afternoon games. “Sunday Night Football” airs on NBC, while Disney, which owns ESPN and ABC, has the rights to show “Monday Night Football”. Beginning next year, Google’s YouTube will be able to stream “Sunday Tickets,” which include out-of-market games on Sundays. But Nathanson hopes the future will be different, as streaming services find more viewers. Amazon owns the rights to “Thursday Night Football” until 2033. About two-thirds of evening viewers in the 2021-2022 season will make the jump from linear TV to streaming in 2022-2023, Nathanson said. The vast majority – about 82% – of fans who stopped watching were over the age of 50. More important to advertisers was the fact that the number of viewers aged 18 to 49 declined by only 14%. And, also noteworthy, Amazon said it made an 11% gain in the highly desirable audience aged 18-34. All of this is to say that there is a reason why advertisers still care about having their ads appear during football games. They deliver viewers and eyeballs. For example, over 100 million households for the Super Bowl. This year’s game will be lighter on the crypto ads that dominated last year, but advertising giants General Motors, T-Mobile and Budweiser will be back. Nathanson has outperformed Amazon, Comcast, Disney, Fox and Alphabet. He rates Paramount Underperform. Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC.