Amazon Won’t “Reinvent The Wheel” As It Takes Over Thursday Night Football, Al Michaels Says

One of the most closely watched changes in this year’s NFLNFL
is Amazon’sAMZN
AMAZON
first season producing its own game cast of Thursday Night FootballFTBL
, at a price of about $11
billion a year. But don’t expect Amazon to change everything around, says someone who should know, the Hall of FameFAME2
broadcaster whom the e-commerce and cloud giant hired to do play-by-play.

“I’m not going to reinvent the wheel. None of us are,” said Al Michaels during a jovial CNBC
NBCCNBC
interview with “Halftime Report” anchor Scott Wapner on the morning of Amazon’s first regular-season game tonight. The game will feature the Kansas City Chiefs and division rival Los Angeles Chargers, as well as two of the hottest young quarterbacks in the game, Patrick Mahomes and Justin Herbert.

YesYES3
, Amazon is going to tap the “X-Ray” technology it uses on PrimeD2D
VideoVIDEO
movies and series to provide more on-screen information about Mahomes, Herbert, and other players as the game unfolds, Michaels said. Expect deeper and more “next-gen” statistics about the game, and individual players.

“But the game is going to look like the game,” Michaels said.

Amazon has promised it will innovate with the announcing presentation beyond the lead team of Michaels and long-time ESPNESPN
college commentator Kirk Herbstreit. There’ll be an alternative feed featuring a Spanish-language announcing team, of course, and still another that Amazon is calling Prime Vision with Next-Gen Stats. Another feed will feature YouTube stars DudeDUDE
Perfect, who specialize in setting up elaborate videos of trick shots of all kinds.

“The only thing that scares me is if they get a higher rating than we do,” Michaels said.

Amazon had its own practice game the last week of preseason, carrying an exhibition matchup between San Francisco and Houston that drew just over a million viewers, according to Nielsen, which Amazon hired to provide advertisers with viewership data.

TVBVB
TVB
, an advertising trade group representing broadcast TV, quickly crunched those Nielsen numbers and proclaimed that 48% of the preseason game’s viewership was actually watched on the local broadcast outlets in both teams’ home cities. As part of its efforts to maintain a prized antitrust exemption with Congress, the league carved out the local-viewership exception for broadcasters in home markets.

“The power of local broadcast TV and major sports franchises couldn’t be more clear,” TVB president and CEOCEO
Steve Lanzano said. “Football enthusiasts love their home teams and overwhelmingly choose to watch their games on hometown TV stations. Just two local broadcast TV stations in San Francisco and Houston easily attracted 48% of Amazon’s national delivery, and that’s just preseason!”

And Lanzano wasn’t the only proclaiming the continued vitality of broadcast. On Tuesday, Sinclair BroadcastingBROC
Group COOCOO
Rob Weisbord, who oversees the nation’s second-biggest broadcasting group, pointed to the TVB viewership stats as another example of broadcast’s continuing vitality. Weisbord made the comments as part of a NextNET2
TV conference panel that I moderated.

Some other parts of the Thursday Night Football experience won’t change either. Amazon contracted with DirecTVTV
to continue to provide the Thursday night game casts to more than 200,000 bars, restaurants and other commercial venues, rather than start from scratch with what has long been one of the big viewership sources for NFL games in general.

DirecTV, which is slated to lose the Sunday Ticket package of out-of-market NFL games next season, may also be able to cut a similar deal for carriage with its long-time commercial customers, working with whichever service wins those drawn-out negotiations. Reports suggest that Amazon, AppleAAPL
APP
APPLE
or late-joining Alphabet’s YouTube TV might get the package, but no timing has been announced for a deal with any of them.

Michaels has kicked off each NFL season with a morning appearance on CNBC for years. As with previous appearances while part of CNBC corporate cousin NBC or other outlets, Michaels has also offered up his own investment advice/observations/commiserations. Asked this morning if he had any advice for viewers amid what’s been a brutal week in the stock markets, Michaels had two ideas:

“First of all, wear a blindfold,” he said, so you can avoid watching the market plummet as it did early in the week after dismaying news on continued high inflation. “Second, I’m going to take all the cash I have and put it in cans and bury it in the backyard.”

CNBC hosts kicked the conversation to regular contributor JoshJOSH
Brown, founder of Ritholtz WealthWLT3
Management, for some slightly more rigorous suggestions.

Brown’s approach – given that he believed Michaels is likely both extremely well paid (he is, about $1 million a game), and living in a state with extremely high taxes – was to suggest investing in tax-free municipal bonds in various ways.

“It’s a whole lot better than burying cash in cans in the backyard,” Brown said.

“I hear you Josh,” the 77-year-old broadcaster riposted, ”but you get to a certain point in life, (the definition of) long-term investing… (is) next Tuesday.”