Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

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I hope Amazon markets this properly. My GF and I both struggled to even find the https://www.primevideo.com/ landing page after we signed up. They have two different interfaces... the amazon.com video section and a seemingly unrelated Prime Video site which was difficult to find on their site. I had to use chrome://history the following day after signing up for the 30-day trial.

Amazon is great at specific UX functionality but not so great at high-level information architecture.

Prime Video has a superior video player to Netflix thanks to the XRay feature which tells you which actors/songs are currently playing/acting during the current scene. I've used it countless times.

Speaking of Xray, for sports it would be great to see which players are currently on the field/court during a game, including which jersey number, and if possible the box score when you hover over the game. That would have been amazing during NCAA March Madness where I didn't know most of the young college players.

The only thing missing from the Amazon player which Netflix has is "skip intro credits" button.

I love this technology/product competition between the two none-the-less.

Xray is powered by IMDB, which Amazon also owns right? Is there an entity they could buy to power such a service for sports?

X-ray shows the actors that are in that specific scene. Does IMDB have this information that they just don't show on their public site? That seems a lot more useful of a database than the few titles Prime offers it on.

That feature is damn impressive. It's incredibly responsive and accurate.

There is a premium account for IMDB. Perhaps it is part of the paid service?

Opta[1] provide stats for many sports. For example, in football(UK), Opta provide feeds that include many stats on the game before, during, and after. These feeds can be quite extensive. I imagine most sports have similar services available, though the level of detail I'm unsure on.

[1] http://www.optasports.com/

Opta only provides "on the ball" data for soccer, I know that much, and will only provide it in 5 minute increments.

There is much more accurate data available in Premier League games via ChyronHego, but they don't make that available real-time, and in fact the only people who get to see it are the clubs who are involved in the game.

There is a big, big demand for better real-time tracking of open play sports such as Soccer. Discreate "round-based" play games (baseball, NFL, etc.) are much simpler in some respects.

Cool insight!

I wonder if ChyronHego isn't available real-time due to not being able to provide it in real-time or just that there is not enough money on the table for them to do so.

I'm pretty sure the Opta data is available on a much shorter timeframe than every five minutes, as a side note.

I'm thinking of the Opta F24 feeds, which IIRC are provided in-play every 300 seconds. I might be out of date on that though.

The ChyronHego data is interesting. I've played with is as part of a hackney at Manchester City - a hack day my team won, actually - and it definitely has some value. I get the impression those guys are only really just getting started, but the value of the data is so immense, that they might need to remain cagey about access, no matter what.

It's more likely that you would take the stats from Running Ball, who are the market leaders in 'in play' sporting statistics. These power all the betting sites live stats and all the Live Score type sites you see.

http://www.rball.com/

Opta powered the BBC football and most other sports stats, at least while I was there a few years ago.

Obviously, this might have changed now!

I've always believed each tv channel broadcasting games does the players report themselves (either in-house or contracted). Since the games are usually exclusive to a specific station, I can't imagine there's a big enough market for it to be a service.

They have improved this a great deal on the FireTV device where Prime content now has its own "Channel" just like HBO, Showtime, etc so you can separate what is Prime and what is Amazon Instant Video

on the Amazon Main website you have to click "Included with Prime" to get the prime only content

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