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Amazon Prime Video will give Champions League viewers a new kind of match coverage this season, dripping in data and taking its inspiration from video games.
Prime Vision will offer a version of broadcast coverage in which datapoints will be overlaid on to live play, enabling fans to see a player’s name, their running speed, the distance of a pass and even the passing options as part of the extra information. The service will be unveiled in the UK on Tuesday night for the Tottenham v Villarreal league-phase game and will run alongside traditional coverage.
Alex Green, the managing director of Prime Video Sport international, said the offering would “raise the bar for football fans and offer something meaningfully different” and that there would be further innovation “in the years to come”. Viewers in Germany and Italy will be able to access it from the Champions League’s third matchday.
Amazon’s new approach has been imported from the US, where Prime Vision has operated successfully on NFL coverage for three years. For the viewer it essentially recreates the experience of watching an analyst explain a match using a telecaster, but in real-time.
Further data points captured by Prime Vision include shot speed, jump height and the position of all 22 players on the pitch (displayed in a graphic at the bottom of the screen). The xG of each goalscoring opportunity will also be captured and displayed, putting a metric new to the game a decade ago at the heart of coverage. Amazon has built its own xG model and designed an algorithm that will calculate “momentum” in a match, another live stat.
Andrew Hornett, Prime Video’s director of live sports production for Europe, said the innovation was optional for viewers but showed that Amazon was trying to “innovate with a purpose”. He also acknowledged the influence of games such as EA Sports’s FC in developing a more data-led way to watch. “Gaming has had an influence and [Prime Vision] has been developed by gamers,” he said. “But we haven’t defined a target audience, we’ve done it because we think it’s a cool thing to do.”
Prime Vision has been a success in the US, where it won an Emmy for outstanding interactive experience in 2023. In the following year audiences for Amazon’s NFL coverage grew by 11%. Internal figures also show that the Prime Vision audience was on average nearly seven years younger than that watching a linear broadcast, and that the audience was almost equally split between NFL obsessives and those who knew little about the sport.
Amazon is a fringe player in UK sports broadcasting but its roster is growing and the tech company is able to reach sizeable audiences with its coverage; last season four of its Champions League matches reached audiences of more than 5 million people. Hornett said Amazon’s technological expertise allowed it to innovate at pace and that “it will take our rivals a bit of time to get where we are” in relation to Prime Vision.
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Green said the new developments showed Amazon was “here to stay” in sports. “Rights holders love our approach to their sport, the care we show and the real deep analysis we carry out,” he said.
“It’s not just innovations, it’s streaming quality, it’s the low latency [delay]. I think what we can say is that we have truly established ourselves as one of the leading sports broadcasters across the world.”
