In an NFL game, every big play is a content earthquake. The moment Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Julio Jones catches a touchdown by ripping the ball out of a hapless defender's hands, the effects ripple far and wide. Somebody in the stands with a good view uploads their video to Instagram. Fantasy scores and online gamecasts update. Twitter goes nuts. Friends text "DID YOU SEE THAT" with a bunch of wide-eye emoji. And you get a push notification on your phone from ESPN or Bleacher Report, alerting you to the highlight.
If you're watching the game on a livestream rather than through your cable box, all that stuff usually happens before you even see the play. Whether you're on Hulu, Sling, YouTube TV, or some shady Russian website, every sports fan knows the pain of their stream lagging 30 seconds behind, maybe even more. Add in the occasional re-buffering and all the times when the picture goes so low-resolution it looks like you're watching the National Football Legos, and every fan starts dreaming of paying Comcast too much money again.
That's why, when Amazon won the right to stream Thursday Night Football during the 2017 season, the company decided not to pad the experience with bells and whistles. It didn't spin up pre- and post-game shows, or try to somehow Alexa-enable a football game. Instead, the team sought to achieve the previously impossible: make the stream perfect.
Even delivering an excellent stream to someone with fast internet and a new set-top box poses challenges. But Amazon's Thursday Night Football plan included viewers in more than 200 countries, using more than 600 devices. Many of those people would have slow Wi-Fi and old devices. Others would be watching on their phones, slurping down who-knows-how-fast LTE...