Andy Jassy this month on a podcast <\/a>with former NFL players Andrew Whitworth and Ryan Fitzpatrick, two of the streamer\u2019s commentators.<\/p>\n\u201cI feel like collectively we\u2019ve done a really nice job building a great experience for fans,\u201d Jassy said.<\/p>\n
During the most recent NFL season, which was Amazon\u2019s fourth year exclusively hosting \u201cThursday Night Football,\u201d broadcasts averaged 15.33 million viewers, up from 13.2 million last season. The company said that figure was the highest viewership in the 20 years since the NFL started broadcasting games on Thursdays.<\/p>\n
One of the tech giant\u2019s biggest opportunities to draw viewers comes Saturday, when it hosts the highly anticipated NFL wild-card weekend playoff matchup between the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers. Many fans will stick with the main broadcast. Those who toggle to the \u201cPrime Vision\u201d feed will see features that, in some cases, have taken years to develop.<\/p>\n
Strand, the coordinating producer overseeing \u201cPrime Vision,\u201d came to Amazon from Fox Sports, and his behind-the-scenes co-workers came from similarly traditional backgrounds at NBC, CBS and ESPN, where each had been taught certain rules based on their network\u2019s production preferences. At Amazon, they were told to break them and use the \u201cPrime Vision\u201d broadcast as a proving ground where the most popular innovations make their way to the main broadcast. That leeway to keep what works and dump what doesn\u2019t is \u201cthe secret sauce for us, I believe,\u201d Strand said.<\/p>\n
Fans \u201cwant to know more,\u201d Strand added. \u201cSo, there\u2019s been a huge focus on decision-making. Why do people go for it on fourth down? Should they go for two? Why do they use their timeouts there?\u201d<\/p>\n
When Amazon began its exclusive Thursday broadcasts in 2022, it had been 24 years since the debut of an innovation that changed football on television \u2014 a yellow line that indicated the first-down marker. Amazon felt it could take it a step further. When the NFL season ends, Schwartzstein, Strand and others work with a team of data scientists and engineers based in Israel who develop features for all of Amazon\u2019s sports broadcasts. At first, almost no one on the Israel-based team understood football, Schwartzstein said.<\/p>\n
An early goal was to identify which defenders were likely to blitz. Schwartzstein suggested they base it off the offensive-line \u201crules\u201d he was taught to look for at Stanford. As an AI model was created, the team found it could better spot a blitzer in a zone defense than even a traditional, human lineman might be able to, Schwartzstein said. The feature, called \u201cDefensive Alerts,\u201d lights a circle under a potential blitzer. It debuted in 2023 and was later added to the main broadcast feed.<\/p>\n
Amazon also thought its AI features could illuminate one of the last uncharted areas of football on television \u2014 the offensive line.<\/p>\n
Linemen usually only accrue stats when they fail and give up a sack. Being a former lineman himself, Schwartzstein wanted to show the process of how a line performs, not just the result. So, in 2022, work began on a feature to show how well a line was protecting its quarterback on a pass. For the next several years of development, the visualization was a line that tethered the players together, chosen because Schwarzstein\u2019s offensive line coach at Stanford had used a line concept. On screens, the line changed from green where protection was strong to red where it was not.<\/p>\n
This fall, \u201cone day we kind of stepped back like, \u2018This is ugly,\u2019\u201d Strand said.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t work, so Amazon dumped the visualization. When Schwartzstein returned this fall from a brief paternity leave, quarterbacks were now encircled by 36 dots that individually could change from red to green to reflect where the blocking was poor or strong. The \u201cPocket Health\u201d circle has since been refined to include 650 dots and has made its way onto the main broadcast.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s beautiful about it is I have a very strict background, and we can see where the pitfalls would come from a background of, \u2018Oh no, it has to be like this,\u201d he said. \u201c\u2018Has to be a dish, has to be a tether,\u2019 because that\u2019s what football would teach \u2014 versus the dots, which is a better visualization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inside the \u2018Brain Cave\u2019<\/p>\n
In 2018, Schwartzstein went into a meeting with Turner Sports executives holding packets of sugar.<\/p>\n
He was there to showcase how the XFL might stand out from the NFL. One idea centered on transforming the kickoff, which had become the sport\u2019s most boring play, due to a historically low number of returns. The XFL rules Schwartzstein helped create incentivized more returns by ruling that if a kickoff didn\u2019t land within a certain range, the offense automatically got the ball much farther downfield than under the NFL\u2019s touchback rule. Blockers and tacklers were also forbidden from moving until the ball was caught, or touched the ground, reducing the number of full-speed collisions.<\/p>\n
The resource-strapped XFL hadn\u2019t created a mock-up of what it would look like. So Schwartzstein used a packet of sugar for each player on the field.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was really trying to sell this league,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat do we have? Nothing but Splenda.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schwarzstein had also briefed the NFL, too. The league sent a representative to attend every session when the XFL tested its changes. He didn\u2019t know if it would work. In the end, it became the XFL\u2019s longest-lasting legacy. By 2024, the XFL had merged with another league, but a largely similar kickoff had been adopted by the NFL.<\/p>\n
Few arenas of American life invite more scrutiny than an NFL weekend, which annually produces many of every year\u2019s most watched broadcasts, and Schwartzstein has watched on social media as the idea he helped hatch has turned into a lightning rod.<\/p>\n
\u201cReally cool,\u201d he said, smiling.<\/p>\n
![\"People](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/260106-amazon-football-vl-301p-48b0ec.jpg\")
Nearly two dozen Amazon employees work out of a second-floor control room in Culver City, Calif., to produce the “Prime Vision With Next Gen Stats” broadcast on “Thursday Night Football.”Amazon MGM Studios<\/p>\n
In 2023, the year before they took effect, there were 1.1 kick returns per game, on average; this season, there were 3.8. The NFL commissioner has praised the new kickoff, while President Donald Trump has voiced his disdain. (\u201cWho comes up with these ridiculous ideas?\u201d he posted on Sept. 15<\/a>.)<\/p>\nSchwartzstein is still selling football, in a way, on \u201cPrime Vision,\u201d by trying to reveal what he calls the intentions behind events that can often appear chaotic or random. His personal white whale is to create a measurement and visualization for team momentum. Academics and authors seem split on its real-world existence, but Schwartzstein is a firm believer. Needing a last-drive touchdown to send a game against USC to overtime in 2011, he said he knew Stanford would score.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve seen it,\u201d he said. \u201cI cannot find any way to measure it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thanks to technological advancements, many other metrics can be, though, and many of the NFL\u2019s other broadcast partners, including NBC, integrate the Next Gen Stats platform into their broadcasts, as well. Amazon\u2019s \u201cPrime Vision\u201d feed is unique in the depth of that integration. More than 300 million data points are collected by Next Gen Stats per season using in-stadium sensors that can track players\u2019 location and speed using tags inside their shoulder pads, said Amazon, whose web services help power the stats platform. Researchers sift through that data, and by Monday nights, Schwartzstein receives a packet of information that studies for teams\u2019 tendencies on first-and-10, third down, in the red zone and in short-yardage situations.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt mirrors a lot more what I did as a player,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit of a different view 1768060448. I\u2019m not trying to hit somebody, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the job of Strand, Schwartzstein and producer Scott Karpen, who sits in the second-floor control room one building away, and whose voice is in Schwartzstein\u2019s earpiece on every telecast, to package statistical insights that would be illegible to most fans into digestible storylines.<\/p>\n
During games, Schwartzstein cools himself between appearances with a fan, then finds his mark, positioning his feet inside a \u201cT\u201d marked by white tape, before staring into a camera. He knows his audience, but also how to deliver a broader point. He often begins a hit by introducing a granular statistic, then says, \u201cHere\u2019s why it matters.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford uncharacteristically took off for a run, Schwartzstein asked the \u201cBrain Cave\u201d how many scrambles he\u2019d had that season. Before the question is finished, a researcher has yelled out \u201cfour!\u201d<\/p>\n
The game would go on to become one of the season\u2019s most thrilling, the score undecided until the final play of overtime. But even by halftime, Schwartzstein was pleased.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat,\u201d he said to the room, \u201cwas a win for us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CULVER CITY, Calif. \u2014 Twenty minutes before the Dec. 18 broadcast of Amazon\u2019s \u201cThursday Night Football\u201d went live,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-399477","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-football","11":"tag-ncaafootball","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/260106-amazon-football-vl-313p-11816e.jpg\")
Scott Karpen, a producer for “Thursday Night Football,” manages the “Prime Vision” broadcast on game nights, and is the voice in Sam Schwartzstein’s earpiece during each game.Amazon MGM Studios<\/p>\n