Archives

Amazon’s exclusive NFL AFC Wild Card game is live on Prime, and the company tells me they are seeing record viewership. On Twitter, some viewers reported varied audio and video quality issues, which is expected for an event with a large viewership and a larger number of older devices. Amazon says they do not see any major viewing issues across their audience.

The stream latency on my Fire TV devices averages six seconds compared to Baltimore’s ABC broadcast TV feed. The Prime app on LG TV averages eight seconds. The stream on my MacBook is 30+ seconds behind the stream on Fire TV devices, which isn’t surprising for a video being played in the browser.

On my Fire TV Max devices, the stream took slightly under 14 seconds to start, but testing again later in the game, the time to first frame (TTFF) was down to 3 seconds. On my iPad and iPhone, I experienced no quality issues. Amazon’s goal for live events is to have latency under 10 seconds, which I’ve seen on all devices outside the desktop. I understand that Amazon’s Sye tech isn’t used for delivering streams to desktop computers, so a higher latency is expected. Testing pirated streams, latency averages more than 90 seconds behind Amazon’s stream.

Speaking of Sye, I’m playing the game from three Fire TV Max devices on three TVs, and the frame sync on all of them is perfect. I’ve confirmed that all three are getting Sye streams, which would explain the great experience. Comments on others’ streaming experiences can be seen on this LinkedIn post.

Final viewership numbers are out for the NFL’s Christmas day games, with an AMA of 31.3 million global viewership for the Ravens-Texans game, with 24.3 million coming from the US. The number includes Netflix’s stream, CBS local market viewing and NFL+ mobile viewing from NFL. While many will want to compare these numbers to the streaming of previous NFL games, it’s hard to make a fair comparison.

The numbers reported take Nielsen’s Live Streaming Measurement service and Netflix’s first-party streaming data to measure viewership. AMA viewership figures are based on National Live + SD from Nielsen in the US, which includes out-of-home viewing, CBS local market viewing, NFL+, and mobile and web viewing across Netflix. International data is based on 1st party Netflix Live + 1 data for TV, mobile and web, along with NFL reported viewing for the NFL’s international distributors and NFL Game Pass outside of the US.

You can see my post here that lists “The Largest Live Streaming Events in History and How They Are Measured.” I see some comparing this to the Super Bowl, but from a streaming standpoint, the Super Bowl’s AMA viewership is much smaller. You can see a breakdown of those numbers here, “Thirteen Years of Super Bowl Streaming Viewership Stats, 2012-2024.”