What You Need to Know About Amazon Prime’s ‘Thursday Night Football’ Debut

Bars and restaurants? Alternate feeds? What about a delay? Here’s your TNF primer

1. Amazon Prime Video airs its first Thursday Night Football game tonight as the Chargers visit the Chiefs. Kickoff is at 8:15 p.m. ET, with the pregame show beginning at 7 p.m. 

Prime Video, which will air 15 exclusive Thursday night games this season, signed an 11-year deal with the NFL in the offseason, so if you enjoy watching football, you need to adapt to the streaming world ASAP. Here’s what you need to know about the Amazon Prime Video NFL package and Thursday Night Football.

• The game will be shown each week on over-the-air TV in home markets only. Meaning, tonight’s Chargers-Chiefs game will be on free TV in Los Angeles and Kansas City only. Everyone else has to watch on Amazon Prime. The game will not be available anywhere else.

• Every Thursday Night Football game will be called by Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit, with Kaylee Hartung working the sidelines. Michaels appeared on last week’s SI Media Podcast and talked about joining Amazon and the challenges Prime Video will face as it gets into the NFL business.

• Prime video will offer an alternate feed tonight hosted by Dude Perfect.

• Charissa Thompson hosts the Thursday Night Football pre- and post-game show. She is joined by Ryan Fitzpatrick, Richard Sherman, Tony Gonzalez, Andrew Whitworth, Taylor Rooks and Michael Smith.

• There will be a tailgate show before the game with a bunch of people who I have never heard of.

• Can you rewind, pause and fast forward Thursday Night Football? Here’s what Amazon says about that: “Go to any Thursday Night Football game and select ‘Record Thursday Night Football’ or ’Add to Watchlist and Record’ to enable recordings for the full season. Enabling this feature before the game starts will provide you access to the full game replay and the ability to watch from the beginning if joining late. Enabling this feature during the game will provide you access to the full game replay only, but limited ability to scrub back to earlier in the broadcast. Enabling this feature after the game will provide you access to future game replays and the ability to watch from the beginning.”

• What may turn out to be the biggest issue for Thursday Night Football after getting football fans to understand that they can only watch the game on Amazon Prime is what kind of delay we will experience. If you’re following along on Twitter, will reporters in the stadium tweet what happened before we actually see it on Prime Video? Will game alerts be sent to smartphones before we actually see the play on Prime Video? This will be the most interesting development to follow.

2. A brand new SI Media Podcast dropped this morning, and this week’s guest is New York Post sports media columnist Andrew Marchand. Topics we covered on the show include:

• What to expect from Amazon Prime and Thursday Night Football, but the biggest challenge facing Prime Video

• ESPN hits a home run with Joe Buck and Troy Aikman

• Pat McAfee joining College GameDay

• Strong early ratings for the NFL and college football

• NBC’s new booth for Notre Dame games

• Whether rules analysts are overrated

• LIV Golf’s TV future

You can listen to the podcast below or download it on Apple, Spotify and Google.

3. We covered the Tuesday Dan Le Batard and Friends show vs. Ryan Fitzpatrick dust-up over Stugotz asking the former NFL quarterback whether he got injured on a waterside in yesterday’s Traina Thoughts. The show gave their take on what went down during the uncomfortable exchange on Wednesday.

4. Keith Hernandez had some advice for the Mets last night that should apply to all of us.

5. You’ll recall that Brian Windhorst went viral for his “I wonder why that is” pose when discussing the Utah Jazz possibly making big roster changes. The ESPN insider recreated that moment with the most prominent Jazz player who ended up getting moved.

6. In honor of Roger Federer’s retirement, let’s remember when he surprised two young girls in Italy with a rooftop match in 2020.

7. RANDOM VIDEO OF THE DAY: Happy 61st birthday to Dolphins legend Dan Marino.

Be sure to catch up on past editions of Traina Thoughts and check out the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast hosted by Jimmy Traina on Apple, Spotify or Google. You can also follow Jimmy on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.