INDIANAPOLIS — Amazon saw the biggest ratings increase of any NFL media-rights partner this past season, and the streamer’s game broadcasts looked far different than everyone else’s, too.
As league stakeholders gather at the NFL Scouting Combine to kick off the offseason, Amazon is starting to think about more ways to trend up again in 2025, its fourth season with an exclusive NFL package.
The tech company turned sports broadcaster’s secret sauce, if you will, is its ability to implement on-air features that linear TV channels can’t. This past season, the main TNF feed, led by Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit, added the defensive alerts feature, which highlights likely blitzing players, from its “Prime Vision” alternate broadcast.
While that addition was mostly seen as a success, the challenge moving forward is balancing the inclusion of new ideas without overwhelming viewers.
“Nothing needs to be forced,” Amazon’s Sam Schwartzstein told Front Office Sports.
Schwartzstein is a former teammate of Andrew Luck at Stanford, and is well known for creating the rule book of the 2020 iteration of the XFL. He now works primarily as the analytics expert for TNF, collaborating on aspects of the alternate feed that is somewhat of a testing ground for the main broadcast.
“We’re building for an audience there,” Schwartzstein said of the “Prime Vision” feed. “It’s a more in-depth football fan.” That alternate broadcast incorporates Next Gen Stats into all kinds of features like player tracking and prime targets, and used the ultra-popular Sky Cam angle for the second half of the 2024 season.
All TNF feeds combined—there’s also a Spanish-language broadcast—averaged 13.2 million viewers per game this past season, which was an 11% bump from 2023.
Amazon may or may not expand more alternate-feed features into the main feed in 2025, but the testing ground will always remain open. “We ultimately want to make everyone a smarter football fan, and going into the main broadcast is a big goal of ours,” Schwartzstein said.
Ready for Kickoff
During his time at the XFL, Schwartzstein was influential in creating the dynamic kickoff that the NFL partially adopted in 2024—and is now considering tweaking further.
Schwartzstein thinks the NFL did a nice job with the new kickoff. “It’s a great place to start,” he said. And count Schwartzstein as a fan of more potential changes. “What’s awesome about the NFL is they change the rules every year,” he said. “It’s the only major sport in America that changes the rules every year.”
