The Amazon experience is coming to the NFL

The first thing I thought while watching Thursday’s Kansas City Chiefs-Los Angeles Chargers game, the first NFL game to air exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, was, “Boy, there sure are a lot of ads for Amazon Prime Video on this game that airs on Amazon Prime Video, considering I’m paying $14.99 a month to watch this game on Amazon Prime Video.” There were ads for the new Lord of the Rings show, The boysand some weird movie with Sylvester Stallone.

To be honest, I was surprised that there were any commercials at all. Most streaming services—including TV shows on Prime Video—don’t have commercials. And Amazon is one of the biggest companies on the planet; its founder, Jeff Bezos, is worth $150 billion post-divorce. I thought maybe they wanted to fill the voids built into soccer games with something unique, something only Amazon could afford to provide, something to convince us that for $9 a month we can have the best soccer experience.

But no: I am now fully aware of the strange Sylvester Stallone movie. I guess it makes sense: Although Amazon pays $1 billion per season for exclusive rights to broadcast TNF, not everyone who saw the game was an Amazon Prime customer. As a rule, the game was broadcast over the air in the Chiefs’ and Chargers’ home markets; people may have been watching in bars, which is something I’ve been told NFL fans do; hundreds of thousands of people watched on Prime Video’s official Twitch channel. And even Prime subscribers, who mostly sign up for free shipping on Amazon products, may not know every Sylvester Stallone movie the platform has to offer: Amazon says 80 million US households watched something on Prime this year, but the company has over 200 million subscribers worldwide.

After all, when you watch a football game on CBS or Fox, they are showing ads for the shows on CBS or Fox. When Al Michaels was broadcasting for NBC, he struggled through painful synopses of the new show NBC was airing; now he’s doing it for the new show Amazon is airing. (He sounded no more excited to read about “the battle for Midgard” than he did to read ads for Chicago fire or whatever.)

Michael’s half-bored ad readings were a reminder that this was not a ground-breaking endeavor. Yes, we were told repeatedly that we were entering a new era of NFL broadcasts, and at one point we got a extended shot of Bezos. (Michaels called Roger Goodell a “pioneer,” even though he’s actually the eighth commissioner of the NFL, rather than the first, and called Bezos “one of the greatest mathematical minds in history,” even though he’s a guy who founded a bookselling company, who doesn’t have a background in math.) But it was still a pretty conventional NFL game broadcast.

To be fair, it was a very good NFL game broadcast. Many people complained on Twitter about technical problems with the video quality or delayand observers noted that the sound from The Arrowhead Stadium crowd was remarkably subdued. But there were plenty of positives: Amazon spent big on Michaels as well as Kirk Herbstreit to give them two of the premier commentators in sports, and the pregame/halftime/postgame crew features Richard Sherman and Ryan Fitzpatrick — two recently retired NFL players with big personalities and big brains – who will obviously be spectacular on camera.

And there were lots of bells and whistles. Watching on a laptop allowed access to enhanced replays and constantly updated advanced stats, such as how many yards separation receivers gained. There was another stream with live All-22 clips, player tracking and staff information, which will quickly become a favorite among football geeks.

Amazon also tried to appeal to The Youths with an alternative stream featuring Dude Perfect, the YouTube stunt collective, as well some sort of pregame show with a bunch of people I’ve never heard of and a dog. I watched the Dude Perfect stream for about 15 minutes and I honestly didn’t hate it – DeMarcus Ware made a guest appearance; he kept trying to talk about the football game and dudes kept interrupting him to do silly stunts and at one point actively reprimanding Ware for providing analysis.

But none of this was exactly innovative. ESPN has produced analytics-heavy alternate telecasts of major NFL and college football games on its networks, including alternate-angle feeds available for streaming. Several companies have produced quality second-screen programming better than the Dude Perfect broadcast, such as ESPN’s Manning cast or the annual Nickelodeon feed of a playoff game. And the NFL’s Next Gen Stats page provides the same updated stats for primetime games that were available on the Amazon portal. The scope and polish may have been impressive, but Amazon’s broadcast was a collection of ideas that other companies have already executed.

As it turns out, a fancy new Amazon streaming broadcast of an NFL game is … a lot like a televised NFL game, except now it’s $9 per watch. month. Which is quite disappointing because there will be a lot more sports streaming coming soon. Soccer has pretty much already made the switch – you’ll need Peacock or Paramount Plus to watch most European soccer matches, and soon Major League Soccer will be broadcast on Apple TV+. MLB already has a weekly game on Apple, and the new Big Ten deal will give Peacock exclusive rights to eight games each season. Even Netflix is ​​considering getting in on the game. As Alex Kirshner wrote for Atlantic Ocean, it’s a future that seems expensive and complicated — and after watching Thursday night’s game, it seems unlikely to bring a game-changing increase in the quality of broadcasts. (And of course this is Thursday evening football, typically considered the worst of footballs. Chiefs-Chargers was an outlier; next week, Amazon will show a Jacoby Brissett-Mitchell Trubisky game. Week 16, it would appear Jaguar Jetswhich mathematically turns out to be the worst NFL play possible.)

Watching advertisement after advertisement for Lord of the Rings, I realized I had gone backwards into the evening. I had wondered what Amazon would do to make the football experience different. But the experience of watching football was pretty much the same. You don’t get better football for your $9 per game. month – just three hours of Amazon telling you why you should keep paying $9 per month after its 15 weeks of football are over.