The Amazon Experience Comes to the NFL

The first thing I thought while watching Thursday’s Kansas City Chiefs–Los Angeles Chargers game, the first NFL game broadcast exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, was, “Boy, there sure are a lot of ads for Amazon Prime Video on this game broadcast on Amazon Prime Video, considering I am paying $14.99 per month to watch this game on Amazon Prime Video.” There were ads for the new Lord of the Rings show, The Boys, and some weird movie with Sylvester Stallone.

To be honest, I was surprised there were commercials at all. Most streaming services—including TV shows on Prime Video—don’t have commercials. And Amazon is one of the largest companies on the planet; its founder, Jeff Bezos, is worth $150 billion, post-divorce. I thought maybe they’d fill the blank spaces built into football games with something unique, something only Amazon could afford to provide, something to convince us that for $9 per month, we can get the premier football-watching experience.

But nope: I am now fully aware of the weird Sylvester Stallone movie. I guess it makes sense: Although Amazon is paying $1 billion per season for exclusive rights to broadcast TNF, not everybody who saw the game was an Amazon Prime customer. By rule, the game was broadcast over the air in the Chiefs’ and Chargers’ home markets; people may have been watching in bars, which is something I’m told NFL fans do; hundreds of thousands of people watched on Prime Video’s official Twitch channel. And even Prime subscribers, who mainly sign up for free shipping on Amazon products, may not be familiar with all the Sylvester Stallone movies the platform has to offer: Amazon says 80 million households in the United States have watched something on Prime this year, but the company has over 200 million subscribers worldwide.

After all, when you watch a football game on CBS or Fox, they show ads for the shows on CBS or Fox. When Al Michaels broadcast for NBC, he fought through pained synopses of whatever new show NBC was broadcasting; now he’s doing it for whatever new show Amazon is broadcasting. (He didn’t sound any more excited to read about “the battle for Middle-earth” than he did reading ads for Chicago Fire or whatever.)

Michaels’s half-bored ad reads were a reminder that this wasn’t a groundbreaking endeavor. Yes, we were repeatedly told that we were entering a new era of NFL broadcasting, and at one point, we got an extended shot of Bezos. (Michaels called Roger Goodell a “pioneer,” even though he is in fact the eighth commissioner of the NFL, rather than the first, and called Bezos “one of the greatest mathematical minds in history,” even though he is a guy who founded a book-selling company who does not have a background in math.) But it was still a pretty conventional NFL game broadcast.

To be fair, it was a very good NFL game broadcast. Many people complained on Twitter about technical issues with the video quality or lag, and observers noted that the sound from the Arrowhead Stadium crowd was notably muted. But there were plenty of positives: Amazon spent big money on Michaels as well as Kirk Herbstreit to give them two of the premier commentators…