Will Amazon Thursday Night NFL Experiments Transform Live Sports Shows?

On the week when one of the sports world’s all-time great announcers, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Hall of Famer Vin Scully, has died, perhaps it’s a good time to consider what comes next in the business of delivering live sports experiences to fans.

In about six weeks, on Sept. 15, we’ll get a first look at what Amazon has come up with for its first season running the Thursday night NFL game broadcasts (stream casts? ‘casts?).

It will be the first NFL game to originate from a digital-only provider, but games of many kinds from other streaming-only providers are already here, creating opportunities to rethink how we watch live sports. Most notable are the ongoing negotiations between the league and Apple, Amazon and Alphabet to take over the Sunday Ticket package from DirecTV after this season, and what that may lead to. But for now, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer already have in place deals with Apple for game carriage, and Peacock has a Sunday morning MLB feed.

Perhaps the most salient fact about Amazon’s Thursday Night Football plans is that there won’t be just one approach, as the tech giant tries to shake up the ways people watch the most popular show on television.

“It has been an amazing opportunity to start from scratch, to really bring some new perspective,” Marie Donoghue, Amazon’s VP of Global Sports Video told Sports Illustrated. “We’ve got great veterans who are at the top of their profession while at the same time, bringing incredible personalities who have recently left the game. So that’ll bring unique current input.”

Amazon’s ‘casts will indeed feature some things that look almost exactly like what long-time fans have had since early in the Pete Rozelle era.

In the booth, another all-time great play-by-play announcer, Al Michaels, will pair with long-time ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit. Former ESPN/CNN/ABC reporter Kaylee Hartling will work the sidelines. Recently retired NFL stars Andrew Whitworth and Aqib Talib will be part of the in-studio commentary crew before, after and at halftime of games.

So far, so traditional.

Also coming, however, is an alternate broadcast of at least some games featuring long-time YouTube stars Dude Perfect. The play here is obvious: the five Dudes have 58 million subscribers on YouTube for their trick shot videos and other content.

In announcing the Dude deal, Amazon said, “Watch the guys predict what happens in the next play and welcome an entertaining parade of dunk tanks, pudding cannons, special guests, and the occasional world record attempt.”

Drawing even a modest fraction of Dude Perfect subscribers to their NFL stream, along with the inevitable promotions the Dudes will be doing in the lead up to the games, could be a big win for Amazon’s freshman effort. Among other plusses, the Dude Perfect audience is almost certainly far younger and more streaming-comfortable than the traditional one watching NFL games on broadcast.

Finding new ways to attract a younger audience has been a constant refrain from the league in a wide variety of initiatives that include mobile apps, video games, immersive worlds, and more. And Amazon isn’t stopping with the Dude deal.

The company’s news release noted the Dude stream would be “among” the “multiple alternate stream offerings” this season. How those manifest, and how audiences find them, will be one of the season’s big questions.

Amazon is also, smartly, in negotiations with DirecTV for a sublicense of its game ‘casts for the many bars, restaurants and other outlets that pipe the games in for their customers. Many of those outlets lack the kind of Internet pipe needed to bring in those games directly from Amazon, so a deal would keep a hefty slice of fans in place while alerting them that they can watch the games (at home) on Amazon.

Still unclear in those negotiations is whether a DirecTV sublicense would provide customers just the main announcing team or also access to the Dudes and other alternative streams. The satellite broadcaster’s delivery mechanism certainly could accommodate alternate streams if they were available. DirecTV also could hammer out a similar distribution deal for the Sunday Ticket package from whichever tech giant ultimately wins the bidding to take over its deal there.

We’ve seen other outlets’ experimenting the past couple of years with their NFL broadcasts as streaming technologies enable all kinds of new approaches.

Memorably, a few games on Paramount+ last season featured an alternative to the usual CBS broadcast from corporate cousin Nickelodeon. It featured enthusiastic young kids as announcers, and liberal on-screen application of the children’s network’s trademark green slime.

Eli and Peyton Manning, meanwhile, have presided over a burgeoning franchise for ESPN’s Monday Night Football after just one hugely popular season. Their shambling, shaggy brotherly conversations (it’s difficult to call what they do “announcing”), punctuated by drop-ins from sports celebrities and other figures, have been a big winner for Disney and the league. Can ESPN+ or Hulu further leverage that kind of experience in the future?

Another live-sports newcomer, Apple TV+, tweaked the usual MLB telecast during its first year of Friday Night Baseball. One nice touch has been pitch-by-pitch stat updates featuring, for instance, the chances that a given batter will get on base or strike out with a given pitch count.

That in-the-moment stat blast is a boon, perhaps unfortunately, for the most obsessive of gamblers on live sports. It’s not hard to imagine those gamblers tapping repeated live parlay bets based on how a given at-bat or half inning plays out. Baseball’s languorous pace ensures there’s plenty of time and incentive to fill the time with quickie bets.

But the constantly shifting stats also provide an intriguing new window into what is already the most statistically focused of sports. For the data-minded baseball fan, the stat updates are a near-perfect marriage of game and geekery.

Something like this is probably headed to the Amazon NFL games too, given the frequent AWS ads touting Amazon’s cloud service in delivering live NFL game stats. Expect to see those capabilities frequently on display now that Amazon is actually running the Thursday Night shows.

And the three-person announcing teams for each week’s Apple TV+ Friday Night Baseball ‘casts are not quite conventional either. The teams are younger, feature more women, and more people willing to regularly employ purple or magenta hair dye.

That is likely designed to appeal to a slightly hipper baseball audience too. Driving all the experimentation is one scary reality: traditional sports audiences are getting older.

Millennial and Gen Z audiences need new reasons to tune in, and changing up the experience in different ways is one approach to bringing them in.

Regardless of whether live gambling, purple hair and green slime make a difference, it’s clear all the leagues need to continue experimenting, giving fans more ways to watch, and more unique new experiences. Given all that, the experiments of Apple and Amazon almost certainly won’t be the last ones we’ll see.