Nearly 300 crew members will produce their last game of the season for Amazon’s Prime Video as the Cowboys take on the Titans at Nissan Stadium on Thursday.
“There’s a huge sense of pride about what we’ve accomplished this season,” JP Palmer, Prime Video senior manager of live production technical operations, said in an interview. “And then also looking forward to taking a nap, right?”
Fourteen games into an 11-year, $13 billion NFL deal, Amazon has raised the bar for streaming sports with a relatively high quality, reliable national broadcast. Though Thursday Night Football has so far averaged fewer viewers than the 12.6 million it reportedly promised advertisers ahead of the season (drawing 11.3 million by Amazon’s metrics and 9.57 million according to Nielsen), it has made a statement along the way: The internet is ready for prime time.
But as Sportico learned during a tour of Amazon’s traveling NFL carnival, it hasn’t been easy. And you need the right truck.
This time last year, Palmer and colleagues, along with experts at Game Creek Video, were in the middle of a monthslong sprint to build six new broadcast-quality production trucks necessary to bring the games to fans. Amid supply chain disruptions, the team talked to Amazon colleagues about potentially using Amazon Fleets vehicles to transport the production trucks each week and possibly importing the switcher devices that make up the backbone of each Prime cast using the company’s planes.
“It wasn’t like we had blank checks,” Jared Stacy, Amazon director of global live sports production, said in an interview. “But also, you know, the budget of it all was secondary in terms of just making sure that the delivery was pristine.”
Stacy would step onto one of the new trucks for the first time just weeks before their regular season debut. Everything had to be ready for opening night, but the equipment was also built with the future in mind, ready to handle 4K and other broadcast enhancements that could become mainstream over the next decade.
From its first show in Kansas City, Amazon drew strong reviews: first, for not melting down in a way that has plagued other streaming debuts, and second, for airing a show that largely matched expectations set by decades of primetime NFL broadcasts. After facing months of external doubts, Amazon executives could exhale.
“Everybody (involved in the production) will remember September 15 for the rest of their lives,” Stacy said.
But there wasn’t time to celebrate. Just as it is for the players on the field, next week lurks right around the corner. A few users had initially reported audio sync issues. Amazon implemented a new tool to measure AV consistency on customer devices, identified the watermarking step that was causing some inconsistency, and cleaned up the process.
“It’s work that never ends because you’re always trying to get deeper and deeper in terms of where those issues are (and) how you can proactively work around them,” Eric Orme, director of Prime Video live sports product and engineering, said in an interview. “It’s never going to be 100% perfect for every customer just because of the nature of the internet.”
While Stacy and Palmer were busy getting the trucks ready for the road, Orme had assembled his own team in Seattle, flying colleagues in from around the world to test how the video feed would perform on its way between the production compound and users’ devices.
“We would inject all kinds of failure scenarios to make people get used to the pressure,” he said. The testing was also meant to clue in workers on how exactly to respond to potential hiccups.
Amazon’s streaming structure is full of redundancy. Even for the internal feed, which is sent via dedicated fiber lines from the trucks to a facility in Connecticut where final touches are added, the production relies on two connectivity partners each sending two sets of signals. The number of possible pathways only continues forking out from there.
In part, the system is built for resiliency. If one path fails, another is available. But it’s also built for speed. At several stops along the online route, devices measure the incoming feeds against each other, choosing the strongest one for the next step of the journey.
In addition to flakiness, past streaming efforts have been dinged for latency, falling 30 seconds or more behind their broadcast peers. Amazon has often managed to cut the gap down to 10 seconds or less behind the live action, on par with cable TV. “We have to get it to customers as fast as humanly possible,” Palmer said.
Thursday Night Football also uses more than 60 tools developed by Amazon Web Services, the biggest cloud computing platform, to prepare, distribute and monitor its feeds. The system has held up well this year, even as more and more server space was taken up by retail shoppers heading into the holidays.
But technical challenges were just half the battle.
For game production, Amazon partnered with NBC, bringing in 24-time Emmy-winning producer Fred Gaudelli to lead the group as executive producer, joined by lead game director Pierre Moossa. Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit were tapped to call the action with sideline reporter Kaylee Hartung.
Palmer refers to the entire crew as a family, but “small village” might be more appropriate. And over the last three months, the local inhabitants have made the new trucks their own. During a tour given before a Patriots game earlier this month, a steady diet of Doritos and Lays chips sustain the team. Inside jokes plastered above desks hint at the unique culture that has developed. One whiteboard reminds everyone “Today is December 1st and we are in New England.” Christmas lights add another human touch to the extremely tech-forward working space.
In the equivalent of the mayor’s office, the truck known as Prime One B, a wall of more than 200 screens awaits Gaudelli. The ceiling here has been raised–literally; Gaudelli likes to work standing up.
Palmer’s desk is one room over. He has more than 250 tiny screens at his fingertips as he monitors various feeds for elements like color consistency and audio levels. Next to him sits Prime Video live events senior coordinating producer Betsy Riley, who handles creative oversight.
The pairing is intentional. For instance, tech teams flagged a clip in one of TNF’s first broadcasts—the video was coming through grainy, with bars on the left and right sides. Was it an encoding issue? No, Riley could quickly tell them. It was historical footage designed to look that way. In another moment, Palmer relayed to her that weather issues were preventing an aerial shot; the creative team would need to change its plans.
Riley also stays in close contact with Prime Video coordinating producer Alex Strand, who manages Amazon’s alternate broadcasts from Dude Perfect’s show to LeBron James’ The Shop presentation. While technical teams built a platform that allows viewers to seamlessly hop between feeds, it’s Riley’s job to communicate with the various shows as they craft separate perspectives on the action.
Before the season, Palmer described the truck assembly process under tight time constraints as “building a plane while it was already in the air.” In early December, Riley picked up that metaphor, saying that the production had found its “cruising altitude.”
“At this point, we’re looking for incremental ways to improve the experience,” she said. In the new year, several key members of the TNF team plan to take a couple weeks off. Then the work will continue.
“We’re probably bringing people in that aren’t watching linear television, and that’s really exciting,” Stacy said, pointing particularly to reported viewership increases among the coveted 18-to-34 and 18–to-49 age segments. “We also know that there’s an opportunity to grow our audience and target people that might not be native streamers.”
While Amazon proved this year that streaming infrastructure could handle NFL games, the business case for moving sports away from the to-this-point lucrative cable bundle remains a bit murkier.
Following TNF’s debut, Prime Video VP and global head of sports Jay Marine told staffers that the game coincided with the “biggest three hours for U.S. Prime sign-ups ever in the history of Amazon—including Prime Day, Cyber Monday and Black Friday.” In December, industry tracking firm Parks Associates reported that Prime Video had topped Netflix in subscribers.
This week, The Information reported that Amazon is considering a standalone sports app as the company continues adding live content. “We’re going to be a major broadcaster of sports in almost every major country in the world,” Marine said earlier this month.
D.A. Davidson senior research analyst Tom Forte has repeatedly expressed skepticism at the idea of Amazon bringing in enough new Prime members to justify its NFL spending, which costs the company around $1.2 billion a year. Forte added, however, that it was possible the investment would be worth it if it helped drive the dagger into the existing cable bundle ecosystem.
Amazon is no longer alone among tech giants spending big money on sports rights. This year, Apple committed $2.5 billion to a 10-year pact with Major League Soccer, while Google will pay close to that much annually to host NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube and YouTube TV. But Prime Video’s debut season has given Amazon a head start.
If all goes according to plan Thursday night, images and sound (in sync, of course) will quickly traverse various digital pathways from Amazon’s high-tech trucks at Nissan Stadium into servers around the world and onto millions of different devices, from phones to projectors. Fans at home will hopefully be contented, none the wiser about the behind-the-scenes effort involved.
Amazon’s TNF feed might be 10 seconds behind live. Still, it looks like the future.
(This article has been updated to clarify the role of Alex Strand.)