Amazon wants to change how viewers watch the NFL
- - Amazon wants to change how viewers watch the NFL
Andrew GreifJanuary 10, 2026 at 3:00 AM
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Sam Schwartzstein, a producer for analytics and insight at Amazon, speaks during one of his on-air hits for "Thursday Night Football." His work at Amazon, and before, has made him a leading voice in football. (Amazon MGM Studios)
CULVER CITY, Calif. — Twenty minutes before the Dec. 18 broadcast of Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” went live, seven people on a studio lot looked up from their laptops to the front of a first-floor room.
“Pregame speech time,” Sam Schwartzstein said.
The gregarious 36-year-old, a former All-American center at Stanford, joined Amazon in 2022 as the face of “Prime Vision With Next Gen Stats.” While the main feed headlined by iconic play-by-play man Al Michaels and analyst Kirk Herbstreit is geared toward mainstream fans, “Prime Vision” is tailored to the hardcore football nerd, and in doing so, is trying to change the way football is watched.
Schwartzstein doesn’t have the accolades or name recognition of Michaels or Herbstreit. But when he speaks, people in football tend to listen — rules he helped create have shifted the way NFL games he now comments on are played.
Inside the “Brain Cave,” Schwartzstein asks each of the researchers why they love football.
Then he takes over.
“I do it for f-----g winning,” Schwartzstein said. “I’ve done a lot of different things in my life but in football, I always f-----g win. From varsity and up, I am 50-6 when I play football games, and this is another opportunity for us to win this week, OK?”
“We’ve got to put our best s--- together, get a chance for us getting the one-seed on the broadcast. We proclaim every week we’re the best broadcast in football. Let’s show it. Let’s get a win tonight, baby.”
Claps rang out. Schwartzstein turned to his table of notes and water bottles. His first time on air, and another chance to change how viewers consume the country’s most popular sport, was only minutes away.
Catering to the hardcore fan
At Stanford, Schwartzstein was coached by Jim Harbaugh and blocked for future No. 1 NFL draft pick Andrew Luck. Both would go on to high-profile careers in the league. Schwartzstein did not. He wanted to go into coaching.
He considered following his Silicon Valley classmates into tech but instead landed at the XFL, working for Luck’s father, Oliver Luck, to relaunch the pro spring league. Given a wide berth by the elder Luck to make the XFL stand out, Schwartzstein adjusted the timing and tempo of XFL games to make them 20 minutes shorter without reducing the number of plays. As a liaison to the league’s broadcast partners, he allowed ESPN audiences to listen in as coaches called plays.
When Schwartzstein started at Amazon, he joined a television production team that had been similarly tasked with breaking long-held convention. How do we cater to the hardcore fans?
“I think our general belief is we give viewers a lot of credit that maybe they haven’t been traditionally given,” said Alex Strand, a senior coordinating producer on “Thursday Night Football.” “We have an incredibly smart and informed fan base. We have people who love this sport, and if we’re not changing how they view it, we’re just assuming that we’ve got everything right and they’re perfectly happy and nothing should ever change. And that’s just not the reality of the world.”
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)
On “Prime Vision,” all 22 players are shown using an overhead camera angle that mimics coaches’ game film. Graphics reference advanced statistics such as “expected points added” in place of “yards per game.” AI-powered features identify which defenders are likely to blitz and where a quarterback’s pass protection is healthiest.
And a dozen or more times per game on the main broadcast, Michaels and Herbstreit’s banter is interrupted by a jingle and a box in the corner of the screen. It’s then that a headset-wearing Schwartzstein delivers, in 30-second hits, what he calls a “guided viewing experience.” He might highlight a shift in win probability, an explanation on third down why a fourth-down attempt is or isn’t sound, or precisely how a team must manage the clock to come from behind in the fourth quarter.
“I’m just trying to help you understand why decisions are being made and why you’re seeing a team do it,” Schwartzstein said.
The ‘secret sauce’
Amazon’s first NFL broadcast came in 2017, and in recent years, it has spent billions amassing rights deals to broadcast the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NASCAR and other sports.
“There’s a reason why 95 of the 100 top-rated shows every year are sports. It’s really the last appointment TV that exists, and the NFL is the biggest, most popular league,” said Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy this month on a podcast with former NFL players Andrew Whitworth and Ryan Fitzpatrick, two of the streamer’s commentators.
“I feel like collectively we’ve done a really nice job building a great experience for fans,” Jassy said.
During the most recent NFL season, which was Amazon’s fourth year exclusively hosting “Thursday Night Football,” 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.
One of the tech giant’s 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 “Prime Vision” feed will see features that, in some cases, have taken years to develop.
Strand, the coordinating producer overseeing “Prime Vision,” 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’s production preferences. At Amazon, they were told to break them and use the “Prime Vision” 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’t is “the secret sauce for us, I believe,” Strand said.
Fans “want to know more,” Strand added. “So, there’s 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?”
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 — 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’s sports broadcasts. At first, almost no one on the Israel-based team understood football, Schwartzstein said.
An early goal was to identify which defenders were likely to blitz. Schwartzstein suggested they base it off the offensive-line “rules” 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 “Defensive Alerts,” lights a circle under a potential blitzer. It debuted in 2023 and was later added to the main broadcast feed.
Amazon also thought its AI features could illuminate one of the last uncharted areas of football on television — the offensive line.
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’s 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.
This fall, “one day we kind of stepped back like, ‘This is ugly,’” Strand said.
It didn’t 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 “Pocket Health” circle has since been refined to include 650 dots and has made its way onto the main broadcast.
“What’s beautiful about it is I have a very strict background, and we can see where the pitfalls would come from a background of, ‘Oh no, it has to be like this,” he said. “‘Has to be a dish, has to be a tether,’ because that’s what football would teach — versus the dots, which is a better visualization.”
Inside the ‘Brain Cave’
In 2018, Schwartzstein went into a meeting with Turner Sports executives holding packets of sugar.
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’s 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’t land within a certain range, the offense automatically got the ball much farther downfield than under the NFL’s 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.
The resource-strapped XFL hadn’t created a mock-up of what it would look like. So Schwartzstein used a packet of sugar for each player on the field.
“I was really trying to sell this league,” he said. “What do we have? Nothing but Splenda.”
Schwarzstein had also briefed the NFL, too. The league sent a representative to attend every session when the XFL tested its changes. He didn’t know if it would work. In the end, it became the XFL’s longest-lasting legacy. By 2024, the XFL had merged with another league, but a largely similar kickoff had been adopted by the NFL.
Few arenas of American life invite more scrutiny than an NFL weekend, which annually produces many of every year’s most watched broadcasts, and Schwartzstein has watched on social media as the idea he helped hatch has turned into a lightning rod.
“Really cool,” he said, smiling.
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)
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. (“Who comes up with these ridiculous ideas?” he posted on Sept. 15.)
Schwartzstein is still selling football, in a way, on “Prime Vision,” 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.
“I’ve seen it,” he said. “I cannot find any way to measure it.”
Thanks to technological advancements, many other metrics can be, though, and many of the NFL’s other broadcast partners, including NBC, integrate the Next Gen Stats platform into their broadcasts, as well. Amazon’s “Prime Vision” 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’ 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’ tendencies on first-and-10, third down, in the red zone and in short-yardage situations.
“It mirrors a lot more what I did as a player,” he said. “It’s a little bit of a different view [now]. I’m not trying to hit somebody, you know?”
It’s 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’s earpiece on every telecast, to package statistical insights that would be illegible to most fans into digestible storylines.
During games, Schwartzstein cools himself between appearances with a fan, then finds his mark, positioning his feet inside a “T” 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, “Here’s why it matters.”
When Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford uncharacteristically took off for a run, Schwartzstein asked the “Brain Cave” how many scrambles he’d had that season. Before the question is finished, a researcher has yelled out “four!”
The game would go on to become one of the season’s most thrilling, the score undecided until the final play of overtime. But even by halftime, Schwartzstein was pleased.
“That,” he said to the room, “was a win for us.”
Source: “AOL Sports”
