Prime Video Aims to Reduce Latency as Platform Chases Major Live Sports Rights
Amazon has its eyes on a package of NBA rights, and adding more sports will make its efforts to reduce latency more important than ever.
Prime Video has an impressive array of live sports rights. In addition to its weekly streams of “Thursday Night Football” during the NFL season, Prime Video carries a selection of WNBA games, soccer matches from the National Women’s Soccer League, a package of New York Yankees games, and more in the United States. Executives from the streamer spoke at the NAB Streaming Summit last week, as reported by Stream TV Insider, and discussed the platform’s efforts to continue reducing the delay between live action on the field and when fans see it on their devices as its sports ambitions continue to grow.
- Prime Video has rolled out its new user datagram protocol (UDP) for live event streaming to reduce latency.
- Amazon executive BA Winston said he thought of low latency streams as any that offer a delay of 10 seconds or less.
- Prime Video could end up streaming the NBA Finals soon, making its quest for low latency all the more important.
Last February, Prime Video officials offered audiences a preview of new technology aimed at slimming down latency, the delay between events happening live and when viewers see them on their screen. The company is well aware that low-latency streams make watching sports a much better experience, and Prime Video vice president BA Winston discussed his company’s efforts to cut down delays as much as technologically possible.
“I believe over the years, Prime Video has built probably the best streaming technology when it comes to sports, where we are able to deliver very low latency,” Winston said.
He also touted the user datagram protocol (UDP) that Amazon employs to offer its live sports to hundreds of millions of customers at a time while simultaneously providing the shortest possible delays. When asked how he would define a “low-latency stream,” Winston replied that any content that requires 10 seconds or less to go from camera to screen meets that standard in his mind.
Prime Video’s head of global video partnerships Andrew Bennett told Stream TV Insider that no matter how much the company tries to reduce latency on its end, it still needs help from partners to ensure that they have the same experience streaming content from the platform no matter what device they are using, be it an Amazon Fire TV player or a third-party device.
“To normalize that, we need to broadly drive down latency on all devices, regardless of what their capabilities are,” Bennett said. “That’s a challenge for us for sure.”
Amazon reportedly has a good chance of landing a future NBA package in the league’s next media rights deal, so its continuing mission to reduce latency during sports broadcasts is highly important. Sports leagues will need the assurance that streamers are bringing their viewing experiences as close to linear broadcasts as possible before they feel comfortable selling increasingly large portions of their rights to such platforms.
Are Other Streamers Having Success With Reducing Latency?
Cutting latency for streaming live sports is a critical goal for all streaming services, not just Prime Video. As more and more sports shift from traditional linear outlets to digital platforms, viewers will need to know that they won’t be forced to watch sports events that are 45 seconds to a full minute behind the live action on the field or in the arena, often leading to spoilers for fans following the action on social media or getting messages from friends and family.
Some streamers are doing better than others in this regard. During this 2024’s Super Bowl LVIII, Paramount+ led all streaming services with a latency of 42.73 seconds. That may be a far cry from Winston’s goal of reducing latency to 10 seconds or less, but it’s far ahead of services like NFL+ and Fubo, which saw delays of a minute or longer during the Big Game.
YouTube TV recently introduced a feature that it calls “reduce broadcast delay.” This allows audiences to choose if they’d like to receive a stream in the highest resolution possible in exchange for a potentially longer delay, or if they’d like to reduce latency and risk the picture quality of their stream being less than optimal.
Streaming services are all aware of the problems presented by bloated latency times, though they are not all as willing to discuss methods to combat streaming delays publicly as Prime Video is. Amazon’s platform has not finished chasing marquee sports rights, and it wants to ensure viewers have the best experience possible when streaming live games.
Amazon Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video is a subscription video streaming service that includes on-demand access to 10,000+ movies, TV shows, and Prime Originals like “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” “Jack Ryan,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The Boys,” and more. Subscribers can also add third-party services like Max, Showtime, STARZ, and dozens more with Amazon Prime Video Channels. Prime Video also offers exclusive live access to NFL Thursday Night Football.