Amazon’s NFL Differentiation Plan in Year 3: It’s All About AI

Amazon is again ramping up its capabilities for its Thursday Night Football coverage, once more leaning heavily in to its status as a non-traditional broadcaster.  

A year after introducing a series of new on-air features for its NFL broadcasts, Year 3 of its NFL coverage will see Amazon particularly flexing its muscle around artificial intelligence, relying in part on sister company Amazon Web Services.

New features for TNF using AI include:

• An expansion of its previously introduced defensive alerts feature, highlighting likely blitzing players, from its “Prime Vision” alternate broadcast to the main feed. This will be supplemented on the alternate feed with another similar feature showcasing defensive players likely to disrupt plays. 
• A defensive vulnerability feature identifies areas of the field where teams are susceptible to offensive attack. 
• A coverage ID element shows viewers in real time what type of defensive scheme, such as zone or man-to-man, teams are using on a play. 

The enhancements, quite unlike what is seen on a traditional linear NFL broadcast, will debut throughout the 2024 TNF season, which opens Thursday with the Bills-Dolphins game to open Week 2. These features add to Amazon’s existing components, such as highlighting open receivers, and have helped garner Amazon a reputation as a destination for fans looking to understand the sport at a deeper level.

“We’re uniquely positioned to accelerate the integration of AI into our live events, given the in-house expertise we’re able to collaborate with and the next-generation compute power that AWS provides,” said Jared Stacy, Amazon Prime Video director of live sports production. 

Maturation of the Portfolio

The enlargement of the NFL production arrives as Amazon continues to amass one of the most prominent sets of sports rights anywhere. The company now operates in each of the four main men’s sports leagues in the U.S. after completing a deal to acquire NBA rights. 

As Amazon expands its national-level sports presence, it’s growing on the regional front, too, nearing a deal with Diamond Sports Group to distribute Bally Sports content through Amazon Prime Video.