Amazon’s ‘Thursday Night Football’ debut looks like it’s been making NFL games for years
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Amazon’s ‘Thursday Night Football’ debut looks like it’s been making NFL games for years

By Judy J. Beasley

I forgot, sometimes on Thursday nights, that I was watching an NFL game being streamed live on Amazon Prime Video rather than a traditional TV show from one of the league’s longtime network TV partners.

What more could Amazon and the NFL ask for when kicking off their big “Thursday Night Football” streaming experience?

A good game, to begin with, and they got it with the Kansas City Chiefs rallying to beat the visiting Los Angeles Chargers 27-24 in a contest that included a game-changing 99-yard pick six. gives and a dude who was getting body slammed WWE. .

The online retail giant and the NFL – Roger Goodell and Jeff Bezos sat together during the game – could also be hoping for a large audience, but we won’t know until next week how many people watched. The digital age is not always instantaneous with data.

While I sometimes forgot that the game was a streaming exclusive (except in Kansas City and LA, where it was simulcast on local TV), Amazon did its best to remind everyone watching that yes, it was. It’s “Thursday Night Football” on Prime Video with a series of ads advertising its products, services and streaming programs. For $1.2 billion a year to exclusively stream 15 TNF games this season, that’s certainly Amazon’s right.

Here’s my quick review of TNF’s regular season premiere on Amazon Prime Video. I watched mostly on my connected TV while diving into the alternative shows on my phone.

STAND: Amazon signed veteran broadcasters Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit to big deals — reportedly worth more than $10 million a year each — to immediately give the games credibility with fans. It’s hard to argue with this strategy. Their rapport feels natural, easy, and feels like they’ve been doing this together for more than two live games (Amazon also did a TNF preseason game). Michaels was the Michaels we know from half a century of live sports broadcasting. Herbstreit, who has been in the TV booth since 1996, offered his usual brand of insight and analysis. They made a few jokes. Sideline reporter Kaylee Hartung and rules analyst Terry McAulay only had limited airtime in the segments I watched.

IMAGE: Sharp. Colored. Vivid. The Chargers’ road whites with powder blue inadvertently recalled Amazon’s blue-and-white logo. The numerical distance projected onto the pitch during a play uses a nifty variation of the Amazon logo arrow. Stupid, perhaps, but not intrusive. The sky camera and other cameras and angles were what you’d expect from major network game streams – and one in particular that I enjoyed but didn’t think was used enough: a camera mounted just above- above the down marker which rests on the white grass of the sideline.

SOUND: The halftime marching band show has made the crew of Charissa Thompson, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Tony Gonzalez and Richard Sherman a little hard to hear at times, but that won’t be a regular occurrence, I suspect. I haven’t heard much about on-field microphones with players and coaches – which is a good departure from the USFL shows this spring that sometimes went wild with overlapping audio from players, sideline, officials and booth.

THE ADVERTISEMENT: As expected, there was a flurry of Amazon products and services (Amazon Web Services, Ring, Fire TV, Audible, Freevee) and shows (notably “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”). Expect this to continue not because Amazon needs to fill commercial airtime during NFL games, but because part of its business strategy with the NFL is to attract more pay attention to his purpose – sell stuff. There were also several adjacent NFL and NFL spots and the usual setting of major brands such as Little Caesars, Mercedes-Benz, Carnival Cruise Line, T-Mobile, Progressive (without Baker Mayfield) and United Airlines. But since it was an Amazon streaming property, there were a handful of tech ads like Apple, Best Buy/Samsung, Airbnb, Intuit’s Mailchimp, Instacart, and Nerd Wallet.

WHAT WORKED: Almost everything. It felt like Amazon released these games solo for a long time rather than twice. The next-gen stats and factoids on the Amazon X-Ray stream were great, and if you’re a fantasy gamer, gamer, or a real numbers and trivia nerd like me, that’s great. I had no latency issues (see below).

WHAT WAS NOT: Nothing major. All sound problems are quick fixes. If you don’t like gambling, you might get tired of DraftKings ads, but bad luck as the gambling team has a deal with Amazon as sponsor and bettor of TNF. I also thought the alternative show Dude Perfect didn’t do much, but I only dipped into it a few times because it took the focus away from the game. Not my thing, but I’m curious to find out what other alternative stands Amazon is rolling out this season.

MANUFACTURING QUALITY: Amazon has poured millions of dollars into building a sports streaming network, and it showed last night. Credit the e-commerce giant with bringing in much-loved industry veterans such as NBC Sports veteran Fred Gaudelli as executive producer and former NFL Network executive Mike Muriano as well. The network also reportedly struck a deal with NBC to help with production in addition to buying a fleet of mobile production trucks and all manner of toys and gadgets. Expect more aspects to unfold as the season progresses.

BROADCAST QUALITY: Without going into technical details, streaming has built-in latency to allow content to reach your screen with the quality you expect. Latency can be problematic for live sports if the stream is more than a few seconds behind the real-time action. Last night’s TNF on my TV (a Samsung model from several years ago, hooked up to a PlayStation 5) and phone latency (Samsung Galaxy S10) was not an issue. Phone and TV were sometimes seconds apart. This may not be true for everyone but it was for me.

AUDIENCE: It’s the big one. We won’t know until next week how many people actually watched the game. Amazon hired Nielsen, which has measured TV audiences since the early 1950s, to track TNF’s audience in all aspects: streaming on Prime itself, streaming on Amazon-owned Twitch, viewing traditional TV on domestic markets of participating teams and out-of-home (people watching in sports bars, restaurants, and other homes with high-speed internet).

The preseason Amazon game (the Texans routing the 49ers on Aug. 25) was viewed by 1.035 million people, and that breaks down into 515,000 streaming and 520,000 who watched on linear TV, according to Sports Business Journal. It was about the height of a traditional preseason game, and it aired against another game that Thursday night on regular television.

Amazon has pumped its streaming football as part of its online marketing efforts and into the physical world — it’s even onto the company’s ubiquitous delivery boxes.

The Amazon Prime Video app reportedly has about 80 million subscribers in the United States, and there are an estimated 172 million domestic Amazon Prime subscribers (who pay $139 per year or $15 per month for the video app). alone) and 200 million worldwide. Keep in mind that only certain subscribers will stream TNF.

Amazon reportedly told media buyers to expect just over 12 million viewers for its 15 TNF games this season, which would be down from last season when TNF averaged 16.4 million viewers. combined on Fox, NFL Network, and Amazon Prime Video (which aired simulcasts). Viewership totals should improve as more fans learn that TNF is now streaming-only. The NFL’s overall regular season averaged 17.1 million viewers per game in 2021, and last week’s slate of games to open 2022 averaged 18.5 million viewers per game.

NFL executives said they don’t worry much about week-over-week numbers, instead focusing on Amazon providing a product that meets fan expectations, after which they say the numbers will go up. .

Also, it’s important to keep in mind that sports viewership is determined by many factors beyond broadcast versus cable versus streaming. Participating teams, storylines and wider implications, star players, thriller or explosion, etc., can all affect audience size. Last night featured many ratings-friendly aspects.

GLOBAL MARK: A-

NEXT: Amazon’s second game, Game of Week 3, is an even bigger test when the Pittsburgh Steelers visit the Cleveland Browns on September 22 in a classic NFL rivalry that dates back to 1950.

Related Reading

Bill Shea: Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” pre-season game drew 1 million viewers. Is this a cause for concern?
Daniel Kaplan: Why the Patrick Mahomes-Justin Herbert showdown on Amazon will produce a paltry audience

(Photo of Amazon reviewers Tony Gonzalez, Charissa Thompson, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Andrew Whitworth and Richard Sherman: Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Judy J. Beasley
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