Amazon Prime
Matt Newman (head of Prime Video Original sports content)
Matt Newmangetty images
When Amazon Prime agreed to a $1 billion-per-season deal with the NFL for exclusive rights to “Thursday Night Football” beginning last season, it triggered the platform’s all-in approach to sports content.
“The time was right for Prime to think holistically about how we pull together a great slate of sports programming to ensure these sports fans who we’re bringing in through ‘Thursday Night Football’ also have additional content that they can watch on Prime Video,” said Matt Newman, head of original content for Amazon Sports.
Take the example of “Kelce,” the sports documentary about Philadelphia Eagles All-Pro offensive lineman Jason Kelce and his journey through the 2022 NFL season before ultimately squaring off against his brother, Kansas City Chiefs star tight end Travis, in the Super Bowl. The film premiered on Sept. 12 — just two days before Prime’s second season of “Thursday Night Football,” which happened to begin with Eagles-Vikings in Philadelphia — and is now Amazon’s most-watched documentary in the U.S.
“It’s such a perfect complement to what we’re doing with ‘Thursday Night Football,’” Newman said. “How lucky could we be to have a documentary profiling the Hall of Fame center on the Philadelphia Eagles, which happens to be the team we got in our first game of the year? Definitely a programming bull’s-eye.”
But while football content that aligns with Prime’s “TNF” investment is paramount, the platform is padding its sports slate with series and films that reach far behind what would be considered mainstream. Examples from this past year include “The Ride,” a docuseries that leans on behind-the-scenes access to follow an ensemble cast of bull riders, coaches and front-office executives throughout the inaugural season of the PBR Team Series, and “Surf Girls: Hawai‘i,” a four-part docuseries that follows the next generation of Native Hawaiian female surfers as they compete to earn a spot on the professional surfing world tour. Prime was targeting young adult women with the latter series.
“Is surfing as big as football in America? No,” Newman said. “But for a specific audience that we were targeting, I think it really hit a home run and we’re really proud of that show.” — Erik Bacharach
