The first Thursday Night Football broadcast streamed exclusively on Amazon Prime Video last night, with differing experiences for viewers. Boomer Esiason and Gregg Giannotti of WFAN’s Boomer & Gio had a unique experience watching the first stream.
“Just looking at social media last night, it didn’t look like there were so many people that were totally turned off by this,” Giannotti said. “That they weren’t watching or had issues and couldn’t find it or whatever else. I think that — for the most part — people knew it was on Amazon and you didn’t have that like complete screaming from the top of the mountain by sports fans when you had our first Facebook Live Mets game or our first AppleTV Yankees game or Peacock Yankees game at 11:30 and people had no idea. It felt like — because it’s been such a big deal and we’ve talked about it so much — that everybody knew where to find the game.”
Giannotti, who has previously said the NFL and Amazon will spin the ratings numbers to make the venture look like a success, then noted he went to a bar to watch the first half of the game, but noted as soon as the pregame began, the splitter being used by the bar to stream to multiple TVs no longer worked.
“So then, they had to sign in to every television in there with somebody else’s Amazon account. And guess what happens then? They’re not all in sync! So one TV is five seconds ahead of the other one. Another TV is 20 seconds behind the other one. And they weren’t in sync for whatever reason.”
“I had it on my iPad,” Esiason said. “So I was wifi-ing on my iPad. No problem on my Amazon Prime app. And then when the Met game ended, I switched my TV over to AppleTV and put it on Prime Video on my TV and I had them both going at the same time. And my TV was ahead of my iPad.”
“That’s a problem for bars,” Giannotti added.
