In broadcasting last fall’s Amazon’s Thursday Night Football package, Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer made history as the first all-female booth to call an NFL game. In January, Amazon renewed their contracts for the 2019 season and, on Tuesday, they received the inaugural Ceiling Breaker award at the Gracies.
“Amazon is an incredibly empowering place in the sense that they have literally told Andrea and I to do it our way,” Storm said at the Sports Business Awards earlier this week. “When they hired us, they specifically went for the two of us. They wanted the two of us to do the broadcast—not a female broadcast. They weren’t going to do it, in fact, if the two of us didn’t do it.”
The Storm-Kremer audio feed was one of four options fans had on Prime Video. Overall viewership of the 11-game schedule on Amazon grew in 2018, although data for each broadcast pairing has not been made available.
Storm said she and Kremer naturally fell into their roles, with Storm handling more of the play by play and Kremer gravitating toward more of the X’s-and-O’s analysis. That Amazon culled Fox’s video feed for the games meant graphics had to be read on the fly and commercial breaks had to be segued in and out without the aid of the production team. Storm has extensive studio hosting experience—currently for ESPN’s SportsCenter and previously at CNN and CBS—while Kremer has long patrolled NFL sidelines for ESPN, NBC, HBO, and the NFL Network.
“At first, we were like ‘Does one of us have to do play by play and one of us have to do color analysis?’” Storm said. “The roles are interchangeable, of course, because it really is a conversation over a football game.”
To enhance that conversational storytelling tone, Storm said she and Kremer dove into the contact networks they’ve built over years of reporting. They made calls to figures such as NFL legend Archie Manning, father of Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks Peyton and Eli, and Connie Watt, whose sons J.J., T.J., and Derek all play in the NFL.
“We did a lot of extra interviews for the telecasts, beyond the norm of just the coaches and the players, and we found that added a lot of texture to what we were doing,” Storm said.
One of Amazon’s points of emphasis upon initially landing the NFL rights deal was its international reach. That global audience and the real-time feedback of a digital product made an impression on Storm and Kremer.
“One of the things that I came to appreciate is that people in over 200 countries are watching our broadcast, and that’s something we really tried to be mindful of,” Storm said. “If there was something that we felt maybe needed a little bit of explaining, we tried to make it as viewer-friendly as possible. We told a lot of stories.”