More than 25 years after the debut of the yellow first down line in an NFL broadcast, the quest to fill the screen with more overlays and information for football fans has reached its Prime — as in Amazon, and Prime Vision on “Thursday Night Football.”
The Seattle-based tech giant is in its third year of a 10-season deal to exclusively stream each week’s TNF game.
In addition to its main broadcast, Amazon offers “Prime Vision” as an alternative viewing option. The stream features AI-powered “Prime Insights” designed to “illuminate hidden aspects of the game.” It’s the same broadcast that everyone else sees, but with additional circles, colors, orbs, and other digital shadings, powered by machine learning and RFID chips embedded on each player. There’s also periodic updates from Prime analytics expert Sam Schwartzstein, a former Stanford University football player.
This season, Amazon is rolling out new Insights that can identify defensive vulnerabilities and coverage identification.
There’s been optimism over the past two seasons about the potential for Prime Vision to change the way we watch football.
But based on our experience watching the Patriots vs. Jets game this past Thursday, Prime Vision isn’t quite ready for primetime — at least not for the average NFL fan.
Our experience was mostly a mixed bag — partly illuminating and partly frustrating. Kind of like watching Aaron Rodgers play quarterback, and then reading about something he said.
Read more for our key takeaways.
Moments of brilliance
There are some aspects of Amazon’s predictive models that are truly impressive. The “Defensive Alerts” feature is able to spot potential defensive players that will rush the quarterback, based on analyzing thousands of previous plays and then assessing what’s happening on the field in real-time.
“You saw the alert, and the alert gets to him,” announcer Al Michaels (the real Al Michaels, not the AI version) said during one play Thursday, when Jets safety Chuck Clark sacked Patriots quarterback Jacoby Brissett.
Fans traditionally track this sort of behavior by watching which players creep toward the line of scrimmage. Does AI make it better by placing a red orb on a blitzing safety, a half-second before the play starts? Potentially.
Zoom out
The camera angle with Prime Vision is unique — it’s zoomed out from the traditional broadcast in order to show all 22 players on the field. This can be cool, especially for the “Prime Targets” feature, which identifies open receivers during a play. However, we’re used to getting a close look at the quarterback with the ball, versus trying to watch how a play develops across the field. This might be good for football gurus or assistant coaches, but not as effective for everyone else.
Excessive orbs
The predictive nature of Prime Vision is cool, when it works. But there were just too many orbs to keep track of, especially for the offense. Sure, we get that a few receivers could be intended targets on a given play. But circling multiple players on every down adds to an on-screen clutter that is just distracting rather than illuminating.
No more nametags
It used to be a point of pride as a fan to know your players’ jersey numbers. Prime Vision prefers to stick a floating name tag over key players on given plays, and have those tags “stick” to the player until the down is over. There were moments during the Jets-Patriots game that name tags on the screen blocked the view of the actual play — a running back could have been fumbling the ball on screen and we would have missed it under his name tag.
Labeling players on the field might be helpful for tracking players on your fantasy football roster that you don’t immediately recognize on the screen, but it mostly just seems unnecessary.
Who needs announcers?
There’s something sentimental and old school about watching and listening to a football broadcast. You surely have your favorite voices calling games. Our eyes got tired tracking so many circles and name tags during “TNF” that we just wanted to close them at times. Part of the announcer’s job is to actually tell us who is in on the play, which receiver made the catch or which defender made a nice stop. It’s the color commentator’s job to make yellow scribbles on a replay and say things like “bam!” Prime Vision seems to want us to just read the TV.
Final thoughts
Amazon sees Prime Vision as an incubator for innovation. Some aspects of the AI-fueled stream periodically end up appearing in the primary broadcast, like in the video above, but it’s not often.
After experiencing Prime Vision, we’re not convinced that the future of football watching will include an array of digital overlays on your screen. Not for the majority of viewers, at least.
Sure, if you’re a hardcore fan that understands the intricacies of a disguise blitz and/or you’re an NFL journalist trying to examine the effectiveness of a quarterback’s decision-making, then Prime Vision may be a neat way to watch.
But for now it feels like most of the Prime Vision features are more appropriate in a video game or coaches room than while you’re watching your favorite team.
Much like the Nickelodeon simulcast that overlays the screen with lots of green slime or ESPN’s ManningCast, Prime Vision feels like a niche product.
To be clear, there are other features of Amazon’s broadcast that we really like.
“Key Plays” in Prime Vision is a way for fans to rewatch highlights of the game so far, without leaving the broadcast. It’s a nice feature to have, accessible with a down click on the remote, so you can find a clip of a touchdown, sack or something else that happened without picking up your phone and hoping your team or someone else posted it on social channels.
The “X-Ray” feature shows all kinds of interesting data alongside the broadcast, including from the NFL’s “Next Gen Stats,” which is built on Amazon Web Services. It’s a convenient and non-disruptive way to get additional stat context on the game, especially in the fantasy football and legal sports betting era.
And we see other aspects of Amazon’s foray into NFL streaming that have a higher potential for mainstream adoption.
Amazon is still new to sports broadcasting, though it is adding more content each year, including upcoming NHL and NBA games.
The company is, however, an e-commerce and advertising powerhouse.
Over on Amazon.com during Thursday’s game, we spotted the combination of sports streaming and online shopping in full force (see above).
There’s not a better time to serve up some football jerseys of your favorite players or team-branded mugs and blankets than while you’re watching the game — or even better, after a big win.
Last year Amazon aired the first Black Friday game in NFL history, incorporating various in-game shopping features. We spotted a handful of shoppable ads with QR codes during the game on Thursday.
Amazon already requires fans to subscribe to Prime to watch these games. They’re likely already buying products through the company’s marketplace.
Watch for Amazon to combine its e-commerce prowess with its NFL streams viewed by millions of people each week in more ways.
More broadly, Amazon has unique technology and data that can make its streams appealing to advertisers looking to target specific audience segments.
“As fans continue to explore nonlinear TV, creating a viewing experience that feels special to each viewer remains top of mind,” Amazon wrote in a blog post last year. “The niche nature of the Prime Video TNF streams offers an opportunity to reach audiences in more relevant, thoughtful ways.”
We’ll keep watching the Prime Vision streams throughout this season. There are several new features that we didn’t see utilized during the stream on Thursday. Maybe one or two will really catch on with fans and announcers, and become an integral part of football broadcasts.
And maybe Amazon’s commitment to the user experience will turn football’s traditional X’s and O’s into UX’s and O’s.
https://ift.tt/fibAc0w September 22, 2024 at 05:07PM GeekWire
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