Amazon Prime Video took a different approach during the offseason as it looked to improve its coverage of “Thursday Night Football.”
While most networks review the film, go to college, or seek input from teams on different ways to broadcast games, Prime Video’s production, tech, and engineering teams visited Tel Aviv to meet with Prime Video’s Computer Vision Machine Learning team.
The goal was to find ways to help fans understand and enjoy football better, said Betsy Riley, Prime Video’s senior coordinating producer of live events.
“I can’t say that I’m able to diagram plays like Vince Lombardi but we spent some time on the whiteboards talking about football, diagramming plays, and helping that team understand how we see the game,” Riley said. “It was neat to be in a room mashing on ideas and having these varied perspectives to find solutions.”
Riley told TNF analytics expert Sam Schwartzstein to think big when developing ideas. Schwartzstein worked with the XFL during its 2020 startup, overseeing everything from the rule book to how players and coaches were paid. He said this was a big step up in machine-based insight compared to the rules-based insight he was doing three years ago.
The first result of this collaboration is giving viewers a better understanding of who might blitz the quarterback. Defensive alerts will be on Prime Vision with Next Gen Stats, one of “Thursday Night Football’s” alternate streams.
“It all starts with these foundational storytelling questions. What if we could show our fans what the quarterback’s looking at? And so that became an answer to that question,” Riley said.
Defensive alerts are an AI-powered feature that will identify players in real-time with the best odds of rushing the quarterback. It tracks player movements before the snap. Via machine learning and custom logic, a highlighted circle appears under what is considered a potential pass rusher.
Tracking for all players is done by RFID chips in their shoulder pads.
The data comes from the league’s Next Gen Stats, which tracks all players and provides analytics data to the NFL. Amazon Web Services has been the NFL’s official technology provider in developing Next Gen Stats since 2017.
In identifying the players for the defensive alerts, Schwartzstein had to ensure scientists had a three-dimensional view of the data. The film shows when a player is in a three-point stance compared to an edge rusher lining up, ready to blitz.
“When we went to the film, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a big guy. We don’t need to highlight the big guy. He’s in a three-point stance.’ It’s like we lived in this data world for so long. It’s still about football and what you see on the screen,” he said. “That’s how we’re trying to translate what we’re able to do from a huge data set prediction.”
