Overview

I was a named recipient of back-to-back Sports Emmy Awards for Outstanding Interactive Experience in 2023 and 2024 for work on Thursday Night Football at Prime Video. The awards recognized the customizable streams experience that let viewers switch between stat overlays, automated play analysis, alternate commentary, and alternate productions, all in real time during live games.

My role was lead engineer on the back-end software platform that managed the live infrastructure: automated deployment orchestration, infrastructure configuration and monitoring, and the coordination layer that connected the live broadcast systems with Prime Video's catalog and app platform. At peak, TNF was delivering to tens of millions of concurrent customer streams.

Technical Details

The live infrastructure ran on a combination of AWS Elemental hardware encoders and cloud services. The software platform my team built sat above that stack, handling automated deployment and configuration of the live infrastructure, monitoring its state through the duration of each broadcast, and coordinating with Prime Video's catalog and app systems to surface the right experience to customers.

The alternate feeds added real complexity to that coordination. Each feed had its own lifecycle that the platform had to track, and the viewer-facing switching experience required keeping catalog metadata and app state in sync with what was live on the broadcast side. Orchestrating that correctly, at peak across tens of millions of concurrent streams, meant the monitoring and operational tooling had to surface problems fast enough to act on during a live game.

Two additional dimensions compounded that complexity: splitting a massive concurrent audience across multiple feeds reduces cache efficiency and places a different kind of pressure on CDN capacity that has to be anticipated and managed. And when a viewer switches between feeds mid-game, the platform has to handle synchronization, getting them into the right position in the new feed without jumping them forward causing them to miss a play, or sending them backwards and forcing them to rewatch action they've already seen.

The systems architecture challenge was less about any single component and more about the coordination across all of them: deployment, configuration, state management, and integration with the broader Prime Video platform, all running reliably under live broadcast conditions.

Recognition

The Sports Emmy Awards are presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Prime Video was named winner across both years, with recipients spanning the broader TNF team. I was a named recipient on the award.