A playback error Twitter user Joe Wagstaff got for Prime Video's S2 regular-season debut. A playback error Twitter user Joe Wagstaff got for Prime Video’s S2 regular-season debut. (@Joe_Wagstaff on Twitter.)

Both linear and streaming broadcasts have shown up with technical issues over the years, but there’s always a lot of discussion about challenges with streaming. And there can be much more dramatic variance in experience with streaming, as that depends not just on the originating broadcast, but on the viewer’s internet connection and whatever intermediate app and/or hardware they’re using to access the broadcast. The latest case of that came on this week’s Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football broadcast, the regular-season opener for Amazon’s second season of exclusive NFL broadcasts, with that drawing everything from slams to rave reviews. Here are some of those:

The complaints here aren’t as widespread or as numerous as we’ve seen with some past streaming broadcasts. But they are more numerous than the largely-positive feedback we saw for NFL Sunday Ticket’s YouTube debut this week. And it’s interesting to see some technical issues persist with these Amazon broadcasts, as Prime Video has been streaming Thursday Night Football since 2017 (starting with non-exclusive streaming: they picked up exclusive streaming rights in 2018, and then full exclusive rights apart from local broadcast stations in the team’s markets last year).

Amazon has said a lot about their efforts to ensure high-quality, low-latency streams, both last year and this year. And as noted above, people having streaming issues isn’t necessary about anything on Prime Video’s end: everything from the end user’s internet service provider to the specific hardware they’re using to access the Amazon stream can be a factor. (This is what makes it harder to pinpoint what’s wrong on a streaming front; while linear broadcasts have run into plenty of technical difficulties as well, those can usually be identified as either with the originating broadcaster or with one specific multichannel video programming distributor’s feed of it.) But it is interesting to see significant numbers of people still reporting issues streaming Thursday Night Football, even if it’s working fine for others.

[Awful Announcing on Twitter; image from Joe Wagstaff on Twitter]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.