‘It just has to work’: Ahead of Black Friday NFL game, Amazon shows how it’s perfected live sports

While millions of Americans think of Black Friday as a prime day to launch their holiday shopping, Prime Video will be focused on yet another live sporting event, streaming today’s NFL game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Las Vegas Raiders.

It’s the second year in a row that Amazon and the team behind its regular “Thursday Night Football” broadcast will serve as the exclusive platform for the holiday weekend game, a new addition to the NFL’s traditional slate of Thanksgiving weekend action.

And even though Prime Video has proven for years that it can pull off live sports for large audiences, Friday’s game comes at a time of heightened attention on streaming reliability in the wake of the issues Netflix had during the Nov. 15 boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul.

While Netflix said the fight was streamed on 65 million devices around the world, and dubbed it a big success, buffering problems were an issue for many viewers who flocked to social media to complain. And the NFL reportedly reached out for reassurance, since Netflix will stream two games on Christmas Day.

The NFL’s not checking in with Amazon. For seven years the tech giant has been perfecting what it takes to carry live sports across the internet, starting with non-exclusive NFL games in 2017, then Premier League soccer games in 2019, and exclusive “TNF” streaming starting in 2022. “TNF” is averaging 14.31 million viewers this season.

With NBA and NASCAR to come, it’s all part of Amazon’s major bet on sports streaming to boost its Prime memberships and advertising revenue.

Eric Orme, Amazon’s vice president of live sports, runs the engineering teams that stream Prime Video games.

“In terms of our approach, our architecture, things we would really care about, we often talk about ‘feature zero’ — it just has to work,” Orme said. “Customers turn it on, what they really want is good picture quality, and for it to be flawless. So that’s really what we focus on, and it’s still at the core of most of what we do.”

Unlike the gradual uptick of viewers during a normal program, Orme likens live sports to a DDoS attack, in which a flood of traffic can make it hard to access online services and sites.

“Your systems have to be ready for that spike,” Orme said.

Prime Video relies on a host of learned and technical advantages to be ready:

• AWS leverage: Being part of the same company as Amazon Web Services does have some advantages. “AWS helps us look around corners” in terms of new technology, Orme said, adding that the relationship is similar to any big AWS customer.
• Full redundancy: There are thousands of variables that can impact a stream at every different venue that Prime Video travels to. From a major internet service provider problem to a piece of equipment going down to someone tripping over a cord, problems arise and backups are key. Prime streams a main feed, Spanish feed, Prime Vision feed, and sometimes another alternate feed, and all require encoding, decorating, media packaging and more — “you essentially have 36 different feeds because of all that redundancy,” Orme said.
• Latency: “We feel pretty strongly that customers should get the stream as close to real time as possible,” Orme said. “So we’ve got our own proprietary low latency player technology that we have been developing for a while. It gets us basically 10 seconds or less on our streams, which is at least as good, often better than broadcast television, which is a pretty high bar.”
• Frame level synchronization: No matter where a viewer is watching an event, they’re always in sync with everybody else. That helps avoid spoilers from a friend who texts about a specific play or outcome, so that everyone is getting the same experience.
• Broad ISP and device compatibility: Orme says for most streamers the easy path is to work closely with several major internet service providers, or ISPs. “We actually work with thousands of ISPs because we care about the customer in rural Wyoming,” he said. “We want them to have a great experience, too.” Prime also works with the broadest selection of different devices globally. “We want to reach every customer, where they are, whatever device they have. It means a lot of complexity on our side.”

As it became comfortable over the years establishing its technical credibility and attracting an audience, Prime Video has begun to innovate, especially as it relates to NFL coverage.

As part of Prime Vision, fans now see AI-powered “Prime Insights” designed to “illuminate hidden aspects of the game” with such things as “Defensive Alerts” and “Key Plays.”

“Those lessons that we’ve been learning over seven years are literally baked into every single feature that we do, every single line of code we write,” Orme said. “We obsess about making sure that what we’re doing for customers is actually valuable and not just cool because it’s cool.”

Much like last year’s Black Friday game, Amazon will also use the event as an opportunity to attract more Prime subscribers and reach more online shoppers by leveraging its e-commerce prowess.

As Joe Pompliano reported on Huddle Up, Amazon’s $100 million payout for the rights to the game is a strategic investment based on what it could mean for securing shopper dollars. Amazon has developed interactive advertising tech that targets ads based on the search history of a shopper, who can make purchases without even leaving the live game.

Orme compared the streaming possibilities against what consumers have expected for decades from broadcast television. Broadcast is like a train, he said — here’s your train, this is the path you’ll take.

“The internet gives you the ability to say, ‘Yeah, but I want to drive my own train. I want to take this path. I don’t want to go that way,'” he said. “How do we give customers that ability to really drive their own experience?”