Nearly 300 crew members will produce the final game of the season for Amazon’s Prime Video as the Cowboys take on the Titans at Nissan Stadium on Thursday.
“I am very proud of what we have achieved this season.
With a 14-game, 11-year, $13 billion NFL deal, Amazon has raised the bar for sports streaming with relatively high-quality, reliable national coverage.but thursday night football Average viewership so far has fallen short of the 12.6 million viewers it reportedly pledged to advertisers before the season (11.3 million according to Amazon metrics and 9.57 million according to Nielsen), but it’s on the way to: I am making a statement like
but, Sportico As I learned while touring Amazon’s traveling NFL Carnival, it wasn’t easy. And you need a suitable track.
Around this time last year, Palmer and his colleagues were in the middle of a month-long sprint with Game Creek Video experts to build six new broadcast-quality production trucks needed to bring the game to fans. did. Supply With his chain in turmoil, the team could use Amazon Fleet vehicles to transport production trucks each week, and the company’s planes were used to switchers that make up the backbone of his cast of each prime his device. I spoke with a colleague at Amazon about the possibility of importing the .
“It’s not like there was a blank check,” Jared Stacy, vice president of global live sports production at Amazon, said in an interview. “But, as you know, all budgets were secondary in terms of making sure the delivery was pristine.”
Stacy stepped onto one of the new tracks for the first time just weeks before her regular season debut. Everything should have been ready for opening night, but the equipment was built with the future in mind, and his 4K and other broadcasts that could go mainstream in the next decade was ready for enhancements to
From its first show in Kansas City, Amazon garnered strong reviews. First, it doesn’t meltdown in the way other streamings have plagued his debut, and two, it’s pretty much in line with the expectations set by his decades of primetime NFL broadcasts. The show aired. After months of facing doubts from the outside, Amazon executives could breathe a sigh of relief.
“September 15th will be remembered by everyone[who was involved in the production]for the rest of their lives,” Stacey said.
But there was no time to celebrate. Just like the players on the field, next week is lurking right there. A few users were initially reporting audio sync issues. Amazon implemented a new tool to measure the consistency of her AV on the customer’s device, identified watermarking steps causing discrepancies, and cleaned up the process.
Eric Orme, Director of Prime Video Live Sports Products and Engineering, said: in an interview. “He will never be 100% perfect for every customer due to the nature of the internet.”
While Stacy and Palmer are busy getting the track ready, Orme assembles his own team in Seattle, flying colleagues from around the world to see how the video feed works between the production compound and users’ devices. I was testing whether
“We insert all sorts of failure scenarios to get people used to the pressure,” he said. The test was also intended to give workers clues as to how exactly to respond to potential hiccups.
Amazon’s streaming structure is full of redundancy. Even with the internal feed, which is sent from the truck to a facility in Connecticut over a dedicated fiber line and where the final touches are added, production is down to his two connection partners sending two sets of signals each. depends. The number of possible paths just keeps diverging from there.
In part, the system is built for resilience. If one path fails, another path can be used. But it’s also built for speed. At several stops along the online route, the device measures incoming feeds against each other and selects the strongest feed for the next step of the journey.
In addition to frakiness, past streaming efforts have been lagging behind broadcast peers by more than 30 seconds, adding to the latency. Amazon often closes the gap between cable TV and live action equivalents to less than 10 seconds. “We have to get it to our customers as quickly as humanly possible,” Palmer said.
thursday night football We also use over 60 tools developed by Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud computing platform, to prepare, deliver and monitor our feeds. The system has held up well this year, despite retail shoppers taking up more and more server space in the run-up to the holiday season.
But technical challenges were only half the battle.
On the game’s production, Amazon partnered with NBC to lead the group with 24-time Emmy award-winning producer Fred Gaudeli as Executive Producer and lead game director Pierre Moussa. Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit were tapped to sideline her reporter to call action with her Kaylee Hartung.
Palmer refers to the entire crew as family, though “little village” might be more appropriate. And over the past three months, locals have made the new truck their own. During the Patriots pregame tour earlier this month, Doritos and the Rays had a steady diet of his chips supporting the team. The inside jokes pasted on the desk allude to the unique culture that has developed. One of his on the whiteboard reminds everyone, “Today is December 1st and we are New He’s in England.” Christmas lights add another touch of his humanity to his tech-savvy workspace.
A wall of more than 200 screens awaits Gaudeli on a track known as Prime One B, equivalent to the mayor’s office. The ceilings here are literally taller. Gaudeli likes to work standing up.
Palmer’s desk is one room up. He keeps his 250+ small screens handy to monitor different feeds for factors like color consistency and audio levels. Next to him sits his Coordinating Producer, Betsy Riley, Senior at Prime Video Live Events, responsible for creative direction.
Pairing is intentional. For example, the tech team flagged clips with either: TNF‘s first broadcast, the video was grainy and had bars on the left and right. Was it an encoding issue? No, Riley could have told them right away. It was historical footage designed to look like that. Another moment, Palmer tells her that weather problems are preventing aerial shooting. The creative team has to change their plans.
Riley also manages Amazon’s alternative broadcasting service. hey perfect‘s show to LeBron James” shop presentation. While the technical team built a platform that allows viewers to seamlessly navigate between feeds, Riley’s job is to communicate as different shows create separate perspectives on the action.
Palmer described the truck assembly process under tight time constraints before the season as “building the plane while it’s already in the air.” In early December, Riley picked up on the trope, stating that the production had discovered “cruising altitude”.
“At the moment, we are looking for incremental ways to improve the experience,” she said.In the new year, some key members TNF The team will be on vacation for a few weeks. Then work continues.
Noting that particularly coveted 18-34 and 18-49 age groups are reporting viewership increases, Stacy said, “We’re probably watching linear television. We’re bringing in people who aren’t, and that’s really exciting.” “We also know there is an opportunity to grow our audience and target people who may not be native streamers.”
Amazon proved this year that it could handle an NFL game with its streaming infrastructure, but the business case for keeping sports out of its lucrative cable bundles thus far remains somewhat bleak.
Continue TNFPrime Video VP and Global Head of Sports, Jay Marine, said the game will be “three hours of the largest US Prime signups in Amazon history, including Prime Day, Cyber Monday and Black Friday.” I told the staff that it matched. In December, industry tracking firm Parks Associates reported that Prime Video surpassed Netflix in subscribers.
this week, information reported that Amazon is considering a standalone sports app as it continues to add live content. “We intend to be the leading broadcaster for sports in almost every major country in the world,” Marine said earlier this month.
Tom Forte, senior research analyst at DA Davidson, has repeatedly expressed skepticism about the idea that Amazon will get enough new Prime members to justify spending on the NFL. . However, Forte added that existing cable bundles could be worth the investment if they help push Dagger into the ecosystem.
Amazon is no longer the only tech giant to invest heavily in sports rights. This year, Apple pledged his $2.5 billion to his 10-year deal with Major League Soccer, but Google plans to pay close to that each year to host his NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube and YouTube TV. . But Prime Video’s debut season got off to a head start for Amazon.
If all goes according to plan on Thursday night, images and sounds (in sync, of course) will travel from Amazon’s high-tech trucks at Nissan Stadium to servers around the world, to millions of different devices, from phones to projectors. Quickly traverse different digital pathways. We hope the fans at home are happy, but we’re not smart about the behind-the-scenes efforts involved.
Amazon’s TNF Feed may be 10 seconds behind live. Still, it looks like the future.
