The new National Football League media rights agreement commences at the start of the 2023 season with matchups being broadcast across various national media outlets and Thursday Night Football continuing to be streamed on Amazon Prime Video. As part of the agreement, Amazon Prime Video will present the first ever NFL game held on Black Friday, and while the matchup is not yet known, it will mark a historic moment in sports broadcasting.
Amazon Prime Video play-by-play announcer Al Michaels appeared on The Michele Tafoya Podcast, hosted his former NBC Sports colleague, to discuss what adding this game means to the network.
“You have games on Thanksgiving and then the Black Friday game is going to be a fantastic thing for Amazon that would probably, you know, sell 18-gazillion dollars worth of merchandise that day for people who are at home logging on,” Michaels said.
Michaels spoke on the transition into the streaming era and how he is proud of the first season of Amazon Prime Video broadcasting Thursday Night Football. Adding Fred Gaudelli as its producer gave the broadcast a primetime feel, and Michaels was happy to see many people from Sunday Night Football contribute to the production.
“Even I was kind of amazed that we could make this look very much like Sunday Night Football or any presentations right off the bat,” Michaels said. “So that part of it was great. The Amazon people were terrific [and] unbelievably supportive through and through.”
While watching a game through a streaming platform can be a learning experience for traditional consumers of sports media content, Michaels is confident in the team Amazon Prime Video has assembled and believes the broadcast will continue to improve annually.
“The streaming world is a different world,” Michaels said. “It’s not linear television…But they’ve got a lot of smart people. The technological end of this thing is trying to work on making this simpler and more easily accessible to everybody [will] come in time.”
