Amazon Returns for NFL Games With AI Plans and a Relaxed Kirk Herbstreit
As Jared Stacy sat across a conference table inside Amazon’s office Monday, Prime Video’s director of global live sports production sounded a whole lot like a second-year NFL head coach.
Last year, Amazon quickly proved it could more than handle primetime NFL broadcasting. Taking over a year earlier than initially expected, the company entered a months-long sprint to get its production ready and then kept on running through the season, raising the bar for streaming sports along the way. Amazon was rewarded for its efforts with a Sports Emmy Award for outstanding interactive experience within event coverage.
More from Sportico.com
Discount Double Check No More: Aaron Rodgers, State Farm Part Ways
Titans QB Scores Lifetime Mayo Deal From Deep in the Depth Chart
Amazon's Thursday Night Football Preps Targeted Ads for Younger Demo
Ahead of this season, given more time to breathe, TNF’s producers plan to further separate from the competition as they increasingly leverage their parent company’s technical power.
“We were making it up on the fly last year,” Stacy said. “We had experts in every position and we hired an amazing group of people to pull this off, but we never really talked through in great detail until after the season—Hey, how did this work? OK, let’s fine-tune this, we might not need this over here…. You’re just gonna see that chemistry that we built in year one kind of go to the next level in year two.”
When TNF returns for its own preseason tune-up Thursday in Philadelphia, much will look familiar to fans. Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit are back in the booth, with Kaylee Hartung returning as sideline correspondent.
If anything, Herbstreit said he’s going to work a little less this season, after over-preparing last year as he attempted to prove he could handle TNF duties along with College GameDay and college football game-calling responsibilities. “If I was awake, I was preparing,” he said during a media call on Monday. “And that’s great, but man, that takes a toll on you, and it takes away from the fun aspect of what we’re doing.”
Meanwhile, in an offseason echo of certain NFC teams, Amazon will be forced to replace its Hall of Fame signal-caller. Fred Gaudelli, this year’s recipient of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award, will remain in an advisory position for the outfit, as Mark Teitelman takes over lead game producer duties.
Once again, Amazon plans to offer alternate broadcasts of the game, including continued collaborations with Dude Perfect and LeBron James’ Uninterrupted. This offseason, the company particularly focused on its in-house, analytics-forward Prime Vision feed.
Every NFL broadcast features the ubiquitous yellow line indicating the first down mark. This year, Prime Vision will add a blue line (the final color is actually TBD) in certain situations, showing how close to that yellow stripe an offense needs to get before computers would then suggest going for a first down on fourth down, rather than punting.
“We’re going to mirror what teams are doing,” Prime Video TNF analytics expert Sam Schwartzstein said, sitting next to Stacy. “Now there’s a secondary goal on third down.”
Shortly after the end of last season, Schwartzstein met with Amazon’s computer vision machine learning team, prepared with a list of 20 possible features he dreamed up. His most “pie in the sky” idea, he said, was the creation of a neural network that could analyze video of a defensive formation in real time and identify who was likely to come on an otherwise unexpected blitz.
Schwartzstein started at center for two seasons at Stanford, so he knows his football. But the model Amazon’s team developed using players’ position and acceleration, captured via player-tracking sensors, proved more adept than Schwartzstein at predicting who was coming after the quarterback.
“I cried the first time I saw this,” Schwartzstein said. Amazon then refined the model nine more times.
It has been trained on 35,000 plays, with the ability to evolve as defensive coordinators unveil new looks this season.
“It’s a very unique kind of in-house expertise that we have,” Prime Video director of live events Eric Orme added, sitting on Stacy’s other side. Amazon is also using machine learning to pick out key plays and program in-real-time recap packages.
Off screen, an entirely different set of models are running to optimize the streams being sent to viewers based on their internet connections and device capabilities.
TNF starts the year with a string of marquee matchups in major markets: Minnesota at Philadelphia in Week 2, followed by the New York Giants visiting San Francisco and a Lions-Packers tilt in Green Bay.
“We’re obviously going to be out in the marketplace in full force making sure every football fan in America knows that TNF is on Prime,” Stacy said. “We think we’re going to make a lot of noise early on.”
A free-to-all Black Friday game featuring Miami and the New York Jets will help in that effort, too, as Amazon attempts to grow its viewing audience in year two of an 11-year deal.
“That’s my bigger focus: Are we getting it right for customers,” Prime Video global head of sports Jay Marine said during the media call. “And where are we going to be five, seven years from now.”
If only a neural network could predict that, I’d be the one getting teary.
(This story has been updated in the second paragraph to include more context about Amazon’s TNF broadcast last season, and in the 12th paragraph to clarify that player movements are captured by tracking sensors and not cameras.)
Best of Sportico.com
