Amazon Sports Execs Pleased With Thursday Night Football Quality, Performance Through First Half of the Season

Amazon Sports Execs Pleased With Thursday Night Football Quality, Performance Through First Half of the Season Latency and reliability were paramount as Amazon and AWS Elemental built out end-to-end cloud-based workflow By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital

Monday, November 6, 2017 - 3:57 pm

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This week's Seahawks-Cardinals matchup will mark the midway point in the season for Amazon's Thursday Night Football streaming package and the company is very positive on how the project has gone thus far. At a media event in San Francisco, Amazon Sports brass were upbeat on both viewership numbers and the overall streaming performance of their product.

Thursday Night Football returns to Amazon this week when the Cardinals face the Seahawks.

Through its first four weeks of self-reported numbers, the streaming totals are up when compared to the numbers of the similar streaming package that ran on Twitter last season. According to Amazon, TNF has reached 8.6 million viewers through the first five games of the package and viewers are averaging a viewing time of approximately 51 minutes. Couple that with what Amazon says is a strong and reliable streaming experience and there's lots of reasons to be optimistic for the sports startup.

So far we've been very pleased with what we've done, said Jim DeLorenzo, Head of Sports for Amazon Video. The video streaming quality is one of the things that we've gotten really positive customer feedback on. Look, we're just getting started. It's been a lot of fun being at the ground floor of this and seeing what makes sense for us. The way that we look at it is is to see what our customers want and to work backwards while seeing if there's something in there that fits with how the sports world is working. Having this opportunity with the NFL has been really nice.

The Amazon Sports team was well aware that at Week 1 the spotlight would be white hot on their platform's performance, and issues such as latency and reliability would make-or-break public opinion of the service. According to BA Winston, Global Head of Digital Video Playback and Delivery for Amazon Video, delivering live streaming sports video in the form of the NFL [one of the biggest sports properties in the world] to more than 180 countries has been no small task. Latency can be affected from everything including geography, ISPs, and network and drop out was not something that could be tolerated but Amazon developed an architecture in a relatively short amount of time to combat all of that and more.

There were a few tenants and broad requirements that we laid out in the beginning that were carried through the whole project and its architecture, says Winston. With live, if the stream goes down customers are not going to be happy, so reliability was a foundational thing that we talked about from the very beginning. We also had to talk about scale. Live is obviously very different from VOD when it comes to tune in. Howe we handled scale was something that got a lot of attention. Then there was latency. With sports, its very different than even a live linear channel. How can we get the stream to a customer's device as close as possible to what they would otherwise watch on a cable network?

Winston's engineering team has lived up to the task, in his eyes, working together with the team at AWS Elemental to create a fully end-to-end cloud-based delivery workflow.

I'm quite excited to see this transition in the industry where we can now do a sport like this at scale, with good quality, by doing everything in the cloud, says Winston. That's a significant transition that we are going to see when comparing to where we may be a few years from now.

Winston also credited Amazon's efforts to begin streaming live linear channels in the U.S. and Europe back in 2015 as laying critical groundwork for what would be needed once the NFL deal was struck earlier this year.

Beyond Thursday Night Football, Amazon Sports has begun forging its path into other arenas, including exclusive rights when last week they announced their plans to live stream tennis with the inaugural Next Gen ATP Finals set to take place in Italy this week. As for as any other future plans the company might persue, especially when it comes to exclusive deals, DeLorenzo was straight-forward in saying its too early say.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2017/11/06/amazon-sports-execs-pleased-wit...
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