NEW YORK — In hearing Amazon executives discuss the kickoff of its Thursday Night Football streaming package next week, a few insights emerged about how the tech giant envisions its NFL coverage and what customers should expect starting with the first game on Sept. 28:
The game broadcast itself won’t be materially different but may have some innovative trimmings for fans, given its presentation within the integrated ecosystem of Amazon Prime’s sprawling subscription offerings.
Thursday Night Football is the start of a grand live-sports experiment and most assuredly will be joined by other rights deals as Amazon bolsters its credentials as a one-stop video shop. This is earmarked not only for cord cutters but also those on the go, as games will be available via the Prime Video app for TVs, game consoles, set top boxes and connected devices such as Amazon Fire TV, mobile devices and desktop browsers.
This is a major play with advertisers as Amazon builds on its current partnership with the NFL, which includes the “All or Nothing” behind-the-scenes docuseries.
And this $50 million expenditure on an 11-game inventory — 10 Thursday nights and a holiday special on Christmas Day — is truly intended for all global customers, not just those in American football’s usual domain.
“It’s just like anything we do: We try and provide the best customer experience,” Amazon Video’s head of sports, Jim DeLorenzo, said. “It’s important to us that the NFL is a big partner of Amazon’s on a number of different fronts. We think that our customers are really going to like this content, so we want to make sure we get it right.”
There will be some uniquely Amazon elements to the broadcasts, such as an NFL trivia game available via Alexa. And as Amazon’s head of marketing and product management, Brian Finegan, said at an event in Chicago last week, there will be some tie-ins to the company’s giant commerce business, with team apparel and other products available during the game. DeLorenzo said Amazon would produce its own pre-pregame show centered on creating an ultimate tailgate, with one-click purchasing options right from that interface, but he stressed that they only want to offer “what makes sense.”
For starters, DeLorenzo added, that means Amazon’s primary focus right now is on making sure the video feed is done well. He declined to make any comparisons to how Twitter managed its steaming package last year — the social media company self-reported strong audience metrics for a young demographic, perhaps because users were already visiting the site to be a part of a broader conversation — but said, “I think we’re going to have our own little bit of a twist on it as well.”
As Rich Au, the director of Amazon Channels in the U.S., noted, that the tri-cast model of these Thursday games — on broadcast (either CBS or NBC), cable (NFL Network) and digital steaming (Amazon) — helps alleviate some pressure for this first foray into live events.
“The flexibility we have to do things very differently — there’s some, but there isn’t a lot,” Au said. “We’ll be taking a broadcast feed, for example, and that’s great because CBS and NBC do a phenomenal job with production. For what you’ll see with Thursday night, it’ll be a really, hopefully, easy experience to get up and running once you go and find it on Amazon.”
Streaming a live event is a departure from the current Amazon Channels offerings — it’s the first time, Au noted, that viewers will have to consider what time something starts — but the company believes sports is part of the service’s natural progression beyond ad-free, on-demand content. He noted the success of the premium Eurosport network available alongside movie channels and other options among the Amazon Channels roster in the U.K. and Germany.
“We feel that, on Amazon Video, our customers are already used to watching and want to watch a lot of longer-form content, which we think lends itself really well to live sports,” DeLorenzo said.
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
Earlier in the day, Amazon announced a media rights deal for the new Next Gen ATP Finals, a tournament for the top under-21 players in the world. And there are reports that Amazon could soon land the entire ATP World Tour for streaming in the U.K. Manchester United’s vice-chairman Ed Woodward told bank executives in a quarterly call that he thinks Amazon and Facebook will be interested in bidding for Premier League rights. Regarding the ATP and Premier League, both DeLorenzo and Au declined specific comment.
“We’re definitely looking at opportunities that make sense for us that we think our customers would love,” Au said. “What I’ll say is, don’t believe everything you read, unfortunately. But it’s an exciting space for us because we feel like we can help grow sports with many of the opportunities we’re looking at.”
At the recent event at Amazon’s SoHo loft, the space was divided into three areas for reporters and industry insiders to explore: one dedicated to game coverage, one dedicated to technology and as DeLorenzo said in his opening remarks, “The most important one in the middle is our sales side.” On loop were a series of ads that will be featured in broadcasts with major partners like Gillette, Hyundai and Pepsi. Seth Dallaire, vice president of global advertising sales and marketing at Amazon, added the value they’ll offer in areas of brand safety, transparency and measurement.
“We believe that we’re doing some really interesting things around measurement in the OTT space that will differentiate the offer and allow us to think differently and innovate with our advertiser customers and agency customers,” Dallaire said.
The oft-cited buzzword at the event that most football fans aren’t used to hearing was “global.” The NFL has made inroads in London, with four games there on this season’s schedule, but generally the sport has primarily been relegated to North America. Amazon is keen on helping the league broaden that potential audience; it has the full international streaming rights for Prime customers in more than 200 countries and will be producing three additional audio feeds for those who prefer Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese or an alternate English feed designed for U.K. residents (or elsewhere) who aren’t as well-versed in the sport’s nuances and might require some education on the finer points.
“Here in the U.S., we take for granted that you turn your TV on, and there’s football on,” Au said. “But if you’re outside the U.S., it isn’t so easy. For the millions of Prime members around the world, we’re going to really make it easy for them to go start watching.”