Amazon is gearing up for its second season as the exclusive home of the NFL's "Thursday Night Football" broadcasts, with big plans in tow.
The 2022 season was about getting on the air after assuming the rights a year earlier than anticipated, but this year will see the tech company with a $1.39 trillion market cap harness its magical computing powers to make its broadcasts stand apart from other networks.
First, Amazon will supplement the traditional yellow line in certain situations with a second line (the current leader is blue) that, for example, will highlight the yard line the offense would need to achieve on a 3rd-and-8 in order for its computers to recommend going for on fourth down.
But that's small potatoes compared to what else Amazon has planned.
During the offseason, Amazon's machine learning system analyzed 35,000 plays to teach its computers to predict which defenders might blitz on a given play. From Sportico:
Shortly after the end of last season, (TNF analytics expert Sam) Schwartzstein met with Amazon’s computer vision machine learning team, prepared with a list of 20 possible features he dreamed up. His most “pie in the sky” idea, he said, was the creation of a neural network that could analyze video of a defensive formation in real time and identify who was likely to come on an otherwise unexpected blitz.
Schwartzstein started at center for two seasons at Stanford, so he knows his football. But the model Amazon’s team developed using players’ position and acceleration, all captured by cameras, proved more adept than Schwartzstein at predicting who was coming after the quarterback.
“I cried the first time I saw this,” Schwartzstein said. Amazon then refined the model nine more times.
Obviously, predicting possible blitzers would just scratch the surface of how AI might enhance a football broadcast. The holy grail would be if AI could accurately foreshadow the offense's route combinations, overlaid against the defense's most likely coverage -- a full-on Madden simulation in real life.
Of course, having the computing power to accurately predict the movements of 22 players in a highly complex game is only half the battle. To truly take advantage of that power and set its broadcasts apart, Amazon will also need to have the right human beings in the truck to know when and where to implement that power.