Apple, Amazon, and the Search for the New Tech Broadcast
With the news of Richard Sherman joining Amazon’s Thursday Night Football broadcast, Krebs’ latest Friday MLB Column explores the differences between Apple TV Plus’ approach to assembling a broadcasting team vs Amazon’s.
Companies are always looking for ways to separate themselves from others and find their place within an industry. As big tech companies expand into sports broadcasting, some reinvent the established wheel created by sport-based companies. With a mix of innovation and tying what has worked for “inside” companies, large technology companies can use big-name broadcasters to extend media figures’ popularity or create their brand of analysis with newer analysts.
Apple TV’s Friday Night Baseball broadcasts started in 2022 with a sleek design and news broadcasters. While the immediate reaction from MLB fans was to criticize the broadcasts because the announcers were different from what people were used to and not at their presumed expectation of what a baseball broadcast “should be,” the criticism from MLB fans wavered and became something they must live with when their favorite team is on Apple TV Plus. Any time a company creates something, unless it lives up to high expectations, there will be an adjustment period in which these companies work to fix the “wrong” and appeal to the average fan while not disturbing the fans who enjoy the sport for its physicality, or those who prefer the “sport behind the sport”.
Rightfully, Amazon took a different approach from Apple and added NFL veteran and podcaster Richard Sherman to an already established NFL broadcasting crew headlined by Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit. Amazon banked on popularity and big names to oversee NFL analysis, on-brand for a league full of spectacle and engrained in entertainment culture.
Both approaches can work if done artfully, but the difference between the two decisions resides in the popularity of each league. The MLB works as a day-to-day league where people become established with a routine. The NFL is spectacle after spectacle, once a week, where entertainment unrightfully challenges on-field play. What makes Amazon’s approach interesting is directly competing with two large sports corporations, NBC and ESPN, that already have a stake in the ground for NFL fans, while Apple has an opportunity to become the baseball broadcasting giant.
Understanding the short- and long-term goals of working enterprises can help organizations, and people for that matter, develop a niche within a larger entity. Richard Sherman’s addition to the Amazon Thursday Night Football broadcast is the perfect bridge between entertainment and on-field play. All left for Amazon is to produce the actual games because, on paper, their all-star ensemble will live up to expectations. Meanwhile, Apple continues to rely on establishing its own brand of broadcasting, with lesser-known names, to be ahead of the curve in baseball broadcasts. Time will tell which of these approaches becomes the norm for media companies, but separating itself from the pack makes organizations define their success within the context of their industry.
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Image courtesy of Apple