A few small notes on Amazon Prime's "splashy" debut for the world's biggest--shall I say, entity for a lack of a better phrase.
Certainly at first glance, it definitely felt like watching a NFL Network broadcast--minus the extra gabfests that they did for 3 hours prior to kickoff.
Taking a small page out of the Marquee playbook, especially having the graphics when the players' stats appear are too small. Even during the game, you could barely see the timeouts each team had remaining (it's a very small blip like feature next to each team's point total.)
However, it was interesting seeing separate interviews that Kaylee Hartung did on the sidelines (what a major turnaround after her last job covering some stories in a war torn country half the world away on CNN) with each of the co-hosts of Richard Sherman.
Also on is a guy who I refer as the LaTroy Hawkins of football in Ryan Fitzpatrick (Hawkins of course played for practically half the baseball teams in his long career), and Charissa's one-time Fox teammate in 2019 Hall of Fame inductee Tony Gonzalez.
On occasion during the pregame show, Andrew Whitworth provided a great perspective as a newly retired Super Bowl champion from the Los Angeles Rams.
Instead of cutting right to the action, there was a small box in the lower right corner so you could see still Kaylee interviewing who she had on.
Also, I don't know if it was the quality of lighting inside NRG Stadium in Houston--but the overall picture was a bit on the darker side.
Finally, I bet everyone is wondering about the commercials if you did not able the ability to record the entire broadcast:
From KFC to Geico, and (gulp) ads for medical companies nobody has ever head of, Kevin Hart pretending to see a touchdown but instead saw an interception in the end zone pitching for DraftKings, I thought it was fine with the coverage that I saw.
I don't think any liquor ads were on, but I could be wrong. Consider the fact that children as young as 7 are going to be looking at one of the most violent sports outside of the MMA, UFC, boxing, and of course TNA and the WWE--thank goodness Amazon was very smart to leave a warning before you entered the portal.
I wonder if they will actually count how many times people will be hitting the 10 second rewind or 10 second fast forward functions anytime Michael Smith provides his inside NFL analysis report (like we need more of that thanks to Jay Glazer and other every Sunday morning.)
However, using their app is really cool. You get all of the basic stats and their Next Gen stats regarding how fast the quarterback throws the ball among such cool stats.
As for the game broadcast--it was fine. Kirk Herbstreit is definitely to going fit in quite well, sitting alongside the legend in Al Michaels. Already he is spilling his vast college knowledge of many of the recent draftees, so he provides quite a background to some of the analysts you see on CBS, Fox, and especially with ESPN on Monday nights (long before Joe Buck and Troy Aikman bolted from Fox.)
Figuring the web's largest online store spent upwards of $8 billion to carry 15 regular season games on Thursday nights until the year 2033, it is going to boggle my mind that they should have at least a bit more effort in how the overall presentation turned out.
The bigger takeway is their recent announcement that
Amazon is the first non-television entity to have ratings provided by Neilsen.Call it kicking the tires, getting the kinks out if there were any visible ones--but if I had to give a letter grade overall, I would give them between a B minus to a C plus. Definitely will need room to improve the overall look of the broadcast, but the general tone was decent for the most part.
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