As an avid football fan, I kick off each week of the NFL season by using my Prime subscription to watch Thursday Night Football on Amazon. I appreciate that the streamer has really stepped up the production quality of its presentation in recent years, and was hyped when it announced a new way to enjoy the first matchup of the NFL week with an alternate stream.
Many networks have toyed with the idea of an alternate NFL broadcast, with CBS using SpongeBob SquarePants and a kid-friendly stream, or bringing in celebrities on shows to draw in a more casual audience. Prime Vision seems to give us the most ambitious look at the advanced analytics of the game, and I’m sad to say I had to turn it off not long into watching.
I Was Excited For Prime Vision, Then I Got Motion Sickness
Amazon’s Prime Vision stream sounded like a dream for a football fan like me, who doesn’t have the mind for the game as a seasoned veteran or coach. Rather than listen to the Manning brothers rattle on with celebs, this stream promised AI integration and showed everything from play design routes to which defenders were most likely to run on a given play. It was essentially like watching Madden football in real life, for a few minutes anyway.
I’ve tried to watch the stream two different times now, and was struck with a wild bout of motion sickness after a couple of minutes. I’m not sure what caused it exactly, and for the record, I’ve only ever experienced motion sickness when reading during car rides. It happened twice, however, and I’m writing about it in part to see if I’m alone in this strange phenomenon.
Even if I can’t enjoy it for bizarre reasons I have yet to fully understand, I do applaud Thursday Night Football for trying to add something new to the football-watching experience. As someone who is at a point in my fandom where I’m trying to better understand the analytics and advanced stats of the game, something like Prime Vision is only going to make the average football fan smarter.
We’ve lived for so long in an age where NFL fans parrot whatever Troy Aikman or other commentators have to say about stars, it would be nice to have more ways to watch football that allow the viewer to think for themselves. Will it work?
Only time will tell, but at the end of the day, people just like watching football more than anything. The important thing is that these attempts to revolutionize the experience may ultimately result in some game-changing innovations that will go into mainstream broadcasts and give us more to look at than Taylor Swift in her suite at a Chiefs game. No shade to her, but I’m ready for some more fresh ways to look at the game.
Thursday Night Football is on Prime Video, highlighting the best matchups to kick off a new week of the NFL each week of the regular season. Those who have a Prime subscription should check it out and see if they can handle Prime Vision better than I could.