SAN FRANCISCO — As Amazon continues to grow and evolve its NFL streaming deal, the tech giant’s advancements in football analytics are catching the eyes of coaches around the league.
“A lot of teams reach out,” Sam Schwartzstein, Prime Video’s TNF analytics expert, told Front Office Sports at Radio Row on Thursday ahead of Super Bowl LX.
Amazon’s main Thursday Night Football feed utilizes new-age features like defensive alerts, while its Prime Vision alt-cast includes even more bells and whistles, like prime targets, pocket health, and more.
“There’s a curiosity to what we’re doing and how we’re showing the broadcast differently,” Schwartzstein said.
Amazon’s TNF package of NFL games averaged 15.33 million viewers during the 2025 season, up 16% from last season.
Schwartzstein—a former teammate of Andrew Luck at Stanford who helped create the rule book of the 2020 iteration of the XFL—feels like the analytics community is “in a really good spot” with more NFL coaches taking a modern approach to game planning and strategy.
“I think it just takes coaches buying in, because the coaches already know that information inherently,” Schwartzstein. “When they hear that analytics is helping drive decision-making, they—or former players—shouldn’t say, ‘Oh no, I don’t like this.’ They should be like, ‘What play should I come up with that will help me on 4th and 1?’ That’s how the Tush Push was created. They were like: If we can move from 55% to 72%—and now they got up to over 80%—conversion probability, that’s what’s driving on-field play design.”
A New Type of Sports Media
Amazon’s NFL streams are focused on what Schwartzstein calls “edu-tainment,” a mixture of education and entertainment.
“How do we make people have fun learning the game? Because the more you learn about something, the more excited you’re going to be about watching it,” he said.
That philosophy is part of what coaches in the NFL are interested in, too. “Teams have been like ‘Okay, that’s a cool way to relay information,’” Schwartzstein said. “It’s probability models, but when you relay it into a ‘here’s what you need to do,’ that’s what a coach can be actionable on.”
