Yahoo Finance anchors discuss the launch of Thursday Night Football on Amazon.
Video Transcript
– Amazon down more than a touchdown this week, but still somehow won the week because they kicked off a new era in football last night with the first streaming NFL regular season game, a Chiefs win over the Chargers. The story was really the nonstory, no major glitches in the app, the feed. It was a smooth broadcast that for the most part looked exactly like those on NBC, CBS, FOX, or ESPN. The team of Herbstreit and Michaels and Hartung was fantastic.
Here’s the problem, you’re Amazon. My take is be different. Do something different. Don’t be ABC, CBS, or ESPN. Integrate sports gaming. Integrate fantasy football straight into the broadcast. Why be everyone else if you are Amazon?
And the other thing I couldn’t help but think as I’m watching this broadcast, Seana is how far out are we from a bar code on that screen that says, it is Amazon Prime Day two in October. Buy 10 iPhone charging cords for $12. I can’t help but think that day is less than thee years away, that we are shopping on our NFL TV screens.
– Yeah, there is a huge opportunity there. I agree with you. I was expecting it to be a little bit more innovative, although I took a step back, and I was saying, this was a huge feat. And they were very, very successful in airing the game last night. So many of the streamers that have had even shows come out– look at HBO Max. They suffered from an outage here not too long ago. A number of streamers have had a tough time keeping up with demand when they have seen so many viewers use their service at the same time.
So the fact that we didn’t have a huge outage here, I think is a big win for Amazon. I wouldn’t count them out, though, down the line, maybe even towards the end of the season, certainly into next year. I think we could start seeing Amazon become a little bit more innovative and not look like what we’re watching on FOX and NBC and ESPN every other weekend. What do you think, Rochelle?
– Well I did see some people tweeting about some of the add-ons that they were able to access, where they were able to– if they wanted to quickly pull up stats and other things, they were able to do that during the game. So if they make that more accessible for everybody, make it more of a social event, I think that could be the difference.
That could be the game changer that makes it a social event. And I know, Dave, you’re big on gaming and potentially having them having a betting aspect of it to really ramp it up. I don’t think that’s coming anytime soon. But perhaps if they make some of the more interactive features more accessible for everybody, that’s at least a step in the right direction.
– One last issue, they’ve got to keep the app– they’ve got allow you to multitask. If I stream my DirecTV, I can multitask, send texts and emails while watching the game, can’t do that with Amazon Prime Video. Multitaskers were pointing that out last night, or maybe it’s just me.
