NFL to split ‘Thursday Night Football’ between CBS, NBC next fall

LOS ANGELES — A coveted package of NFL's "Thursday Night Football" will be split between CBS and NBC, a maneuver that will introduce new complexity into the next fall TV season and attests to the leverage the sports league has in the current media-industry landscape, where mass audiences are harder to draw to scripted programming and reality shows.

For the past two seasons, CBS held sole rights to an eight-game package, which was simulcast on cable's NFL Network. Now, each network will show five games each season over the course of a two-year deal. The NFL said all broadcast games will continue to be simulcast on NFL Network, which will exclusively televise an eight-game schedule of regular season games comprised of "Thursday Night Football," late-season games on Saturday, and additional games to be determined.

And the league has more to do with its mid-week franchise. The NFL said in a statement Monday that it's "iin active discussions with prospective digital partners" for streaming rights that would allow the games to be distributed by a digital player. " A deal announcement is expected in the near future."

At stake for the traditional outlets is something increasingly hard to come by for TV networks: massive ratings. Each of the eight games shown on both CBS and the NFL Network in this current season was the most-watched program on TV on the night it ran, snaring a combined rating of between 14.8 million viewers and more than 21 million viewers. Such numbers would be highly desirable for NBC, which has had problems fielding a competitive Thursday lineup in recent seasons.

With those ratings come ad dollars. "Thursday Night Football" commanded an average of $462,000 for a 30-second ad this season, according to Variety's annual look at primetime ad prices. Only "Sunday Night Football," "Empire" and "The Walking Dead" cost advertisers more in the current season.