Amazon re-ups its Thursday night deal with the NFL, adds a single Saturday game

Football will return at some point. And when it does, you'll once again be able to watch some of the NFL games on Amazon Prime Video, as well as on Twitch. (Which is owned by Amazon.) Amazon and the NFL announced they've renewed their partnership — it had run out after last season — for the 2020, 2021 and 2022 seasons.

And Amazon is getting a bonus game for the 2020-21 season, too, with the addition of a Saturday regular-season game. It'll come in the second half of the season, and the game will still be aired in the teams' home markets.

"We are thrilled to renew our Thursday Night Football deal with the NFL, and are excited to expand our relationship to include exclusive global streaming rights to an additional regular season game in 2020," Marie Donoghue, Vice President of Global Sports Video at Amazon, said in a press release . "We know Prime members and the Twitch community around the world love the NFL, and we remain committed to giving them the best and most customizable streaming experience possible, with a broad selection of premium content available at their fingertips."

The Amazon and Twitch streams on Thursday nights will continue to offer The "Next Gen Stats" that serve as a way to drill down what's going on — while also serving as an advertisement for Amazon Web Services. (If you've seen any of the Sunday Night Games, you've no doubt gotten a taste of this already.) And if you're watching on Amazon Prime Video, you'll have the opportunity to catch the Fox Deportes Spanish-language coverage, if that's how you roll.

The presser also noted that Thursday night games averaged some 15.4 million viewers across Fox, NFL Network, Fox Deportes, NFL digital, Fox Sports digital, Prime Video, and Verizon properties. That's up 4 percentage points over 2018 games. Digital streaming was up 43 percentage points in 2019, to more than 1 million people watching during any given minute.

"As our relationship has expanded, Amazon has become a trusted and valued partner of the NFL," Brian Rolapp, Chief Media and Business Officer for the NFL, also said in the statement. "Extending this partnership around Thursday Night Football continues our critical mission of delivering NFL games to as many fans in as many ways as possible both in the United States and around the world."

The big question, of course, is when the NFL season will begin. The schedule is supposed to be released in early May, which is later than usual. The global pandemic — and the inability to pack folks into stadiums anytime soon — has pretty much everything up in the air.

But once things get going? You'll once again be able to watch some of the games on Amazon.