Man City travelled to Burnley’s Turf Moor stadium on the evening of Tuesday 3 December 2019, in the Premier League, on an historic evening for football, as the match was published live on Amazon Prime Sport to fans in the UK.
There was a simultaneous broadcast of Crystal Palace v Bournemouth, which kicked off a little earlier. I’ll post “normal” highlights for both matches in due course, but as we’re digesting football on Prime for the first time, let’s revel in the benefits they can deliver, like live Tweeting the goals near-real-time, and link up the strikes…
Table of Contents
Jesus Opens the Scoring with a Belting Strike
Gabriel Jesus got City into the lead with this incredible strike for 1-0 on 24 minutes:
Fans Happy with the Amazon Prime format
Tweets coming in from the time suggest fans are pleasantly suprised with the format of Amazon Prime, particularly, there was love for the X-Ray feature, allowing stats to display in the edge of the screen (pictured below).
As commented here:
And here (less rudely 🙂 ):
But Not all Positive
There is a delay on Amazon Prime – I found this on goal number one, when my phone dinged a score update about 30 seconds before the above wonder-strike.
My broadband connection is insanely good (as I said in the UK Broadband Deals thing, and repeated about 700 times per day for the past 2 years to anyone who’ll listen 😉 ) so we know this is not reciever side…
Amazon will want to sort out this lag.
Because I’m a power-nerd and have access to a few as-close-to-live score feeds from sports betting projects of previous years, I can tell you that Amazon’s video was around 26-28 seconds behind the live clock.
They’ll want to improve on this in future, but, for now… turn those notifications off when viewing!!
Jesus Adds a Second on 50 Mins
Gabriel Jesus added a second goal, smashing this one into the roof of the net first time after a nice cross-field pass from Bernardo Silva:
Meanwhile Over at Palace
Crystal Palace 1-0 Bournemouth
Palace won 1-0 despite having Sakho sent off, courtesy of a 76th minute strike from Shclupp.
The Goal from Shclupp
Rodri Adds Incredible Third for City
Legend may tell that Jeff Bezos did an actual cartwheel when the third goal was also a screamer, this time from Rodri. Unreal technique.
Mahrez Makes it 4-0
Riyad Mahrez made it 4-0 to the visitors with another snappy goal following some fast-paced passing.
Burnley Bag a Consolation
City failed again to claim a clean sheet – something which is becoming a habit – as Burnley made it 4-1 on the night, thanks to a smart finish from Robbie Brady on 89 minutes.
The match would finish at this score, after an entertaining Premier League clash…
There’s more to come on Wednesday evening, also on Amazon Prime.
How do I get Me Some of that?!
You can sign up for Amazon Prime by clicking here. It’s a free trial for 30 day… yes, you’ll need to add your credit card. And yes, they are hoping you’ll forget to cancel. But it’s cool. We get it.
That link is also my Amazon Associate link, which means I’ll maybe get some brass if you do sign up, but you’re effectively sponsoring me to say stuff aboue Jeff Bezos doing cartwheels, so I’m going to assume your okay about this, as well.
What’s the Verdict?
I was always going to like this, as long as they didn’t mess it up, to be honest, as I already basically subscribe all the other available options, and love watching football.
Loved: the stats in X-Ray; the commentators were the right choices.
Didn’t Love: the lag. This needs some attention, though there are for sure some technical challenges.
In particular, we need better broadband infrastructure in the UK… it doesn’t even need to be free (Hint: Jeremy Corbyn 😉 ) – but it does need to deliver decent performance. I couldn’t have watched this in millions of households who suffer from slow connection speeds.
