SVG Sit-Down: Prime Video EP Mike Muriano Previews Massive Black Friday Slate Featuring NFL, NBA, and Golf

Roughly 15-hour affair offers The Skins Game, Black Friday Football, NBA doubleheader

This Friday marks a new high point in Amazon Prime Video’s live-sports journey. The streamer will deliver its largest single-day slate of live sports programming to date. The roughly 15-hour effort — comprising The Skins Game, Black Friday Football, and a primetime NBA doubleheader — will make Prime Video a major sports destination as fans at home scarf Thanksgiving leftovers and scour the internet for the day’s biggest sales.

Prime Video’s Mike Muriano: “Our hope is that we have people tuning in all day long from 9 a.m. ‘til late that night. It’s going to be a day to remember.”

It starts with the return of The Skins Game (Prime Video’s first-ever golf broadcast), teeing off a 9 a.m. ET, followed by Black Friday Football featuring the Bears and Eagles at Lincoln Financial Field (onsite pregame show at 1:30 p.m., kickoff at 3 p.m.). At the conclusion of live onsite NFL postgame coverage, the NBA on Prime tips off at 7 p.m. with a doubleheader: Bucks vs. Knicks from New York’s Madison Square Garden and Mavericks vs. Lakers from Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

SVG sat down with Prime Video Executive Producer Mike Muriano, who will oversee it all from Prime Video’s Culver City, CA, studios. The four-year Prime Video vet discusses his team’s production philosophy, its goal of creating a seamless experience across multiple events, and how Prime Video’s first month of NBA coverage has gone thus far.

Where does this Friday sit in the overall arc of Prime Video Sports?
We’ve come a long way in [a short period]. We’ve gone from essentially no activity on Thanksgiving week to adding the Black Friday Football game in the past two seasons and now adding The Skins Game and our Friday NBA doubleheader. It’s a lot to absorb, but we’re confident it’s going to be an amazing day.

With so many events going on across the country, where will you be located on Friday?
Because we have so much going on, Jared Stacy [VP/head of worldwide live sports production] and I thought it would be detrimental and isolating to be physically located onsite at any of these [events]. As part the launch of our NBA coverage, for the first time in our existence, we have a fully functional studio and production facility in Culver City. So I will be here in Culver City bright and early Friday morning, serving as the conduit for our golf coverage and homing in on the Black Friday Football game that follows. We are going to make sure that transition goes smoothly, and I’ll be in my typical TNF role, working with our production team from the proverbial back bench — except in Culver City. The rest of the day, everything will be funneled through the nerve center here in Culver City, including our NBA broadcasts from New York and L.A. Our game crews will be onsite.

How are you looking to keep a consistent feel and flow throughout the day as you transition between multiple events?
We’re going to make it as seamless as possible. You have to tip your cap here to our acquisitions and programming teams for giving us this challenge in the first place by lining up such an amazing day of live sports. We’re excited about The Skins Game. It’s a perfect way to kick things off, but [the schedule is] definitely centered on the Black Friday Football game. And the schedule lined up perfectly since we have our usual Friday NBA doubleheader, which will be a perfect way to finish off the day.

I think there is a lot of shared DNA between [our NFL and NBA teams]. When we did our annual NFL talent seminar earlier in the year to get up to speed on everything and talk about our coverage philosophy, we were able to do that as a crossover with our NBA group, too. There was a lot of bonding and building as they spent some time together. I think that’s going to be reflected on Friday. Audiences are also used to seeing [sports journalist and broadcaster] Taylor Rooks on Thursday Night Football, and now we have her in the anchor seat for the NBA, so that is connective tissue as well.

Whenever we bring new properties, we have these key tenets and philosophies to create a singular identity and culture. But, at the same time, we need to be mindful and respective of the nuances of each of those sports. We don’t want cookie-cutter across the board. Whether it’s the NFL, NBA, NASCAR, WNBA, now golf, or anything else, we want to make sure that storytelling is at the core of what we do. We need to entertain, inform, and educate. Those will be our key themes throughout the day.

Then, of course, you layer in the data, which has become a signature for us. We are going to provide opportunities to showcase data as we always do.

Lastly, because it’s Black Friday, there is a retail component to all this, and we’ll weave that in throughout the day. We want to make sure we’re doing that in the proper doses, though, and aren’t shoving it down people’s throats and turning them off.

What can we expect from Prime Video’s first golf outing during the Skins Game coverage?
This is our first foray into the golf world, which is exciting. We’ve got great partners [in Pro Shop Studios and TMRW Sports], who are leading production. We’re certainly going to put our own stamp on golf, but our approach with all the sports we cover has always been to avoid being different just for the sake of being different. Sure, we will try different things and encourage innovative thinking, but we want to make sure that fans have a good viewing experience overall, and that means focusing on telling the story of the game. That will be the focus [for The Skins Game].

We’ve seen different variations of [this format in recent years], but The Skins Game is iconic. We’re looking forward to getting these top professionals competing at the height of their game but in a looser environment, where there will be some trash talking and challenging each other. You get to see them with their guard down a little bit, which is a lot of fun.

Of course, they take it seriously, and the stakes they’re playing for make it serious, but I love that our first foray into the golf world is going to be something unique like The Skins Game. We are going to lean into that all-access angle in working with our partners. The goal is to [deliver] a fun event where fans get to see these golfers in a slightly different environment.

And what can we expect from the Black Friday Football broadcast compared with the past couple of years?
First and foremost, having the Bears and Eagles matchup, with two great teams competing, panned out very nicely. We’re obviously thrilled to have a matchup like that with two playoff contenders. From a production perspective, we will be adding all the bells and whistles that we had in previous Black Friday Football games. We’ll have a lot of fun elements in the studio show as well, including the return of Chef David Chang.

It’s amazing the amount of work and thought that goes into each week for TNF in terms of the trucks and resources that we bring onsite. We look at every game week in and week out as a huge show, and Black Friday will be no different. This one has a little added incentive because it is Black Friday and we’re working with the league to establish a new football holiday. For us, it’s another multisport holiday, so we’re certainly going to make it feel like a big-time event.

How has the NBA season gone for your team thus far? What are some highlights from a production perspective?
Anytime you launch a new property, it’s a massive undertaking. Couple that with building and launching a new studio facility, and it hits a whole other level. I am so proud to be a part of this team and how quickly they were able to pull it all together. It’s a beautiful and dynamic studio that reflects our character and culture. Our engineering team is the best in the business, and they were able to get that up and running despite a really short timeline: it was an empty sound stage in late in May. and now here it is this fully functional state-of-the-art studio. We’re still learning and growing with it, which is also exciting.

Overall, we’ve been very pleased with our coverage so far. We have to step back and remind ourselves that it has been only four weeks [since our Oct. 24 launch], which is amazing. We will continue to dial it in as the season moves forward.

We have a handful of studio talent [for whom] this is their first foray into doing television, and that’s exciting in itself. I think the reactions we’re seeing — whether from various media outlets or online social chatter on how we’re covering the game and the approach we’re taking to the studio show — have been encouraging.

How are you looking to utilize Friday as a tentpole opportunity to showcase the NBA coverage?
Typically, our NBA coverage, like most of our sports, comes up out of darkness at 6:30 p.m. with our pregame show. But to now have a huge lead-in with this NFL matchup is very exciting. Hopefully, we’ll get even more people to see what we’re doing on the NBA side, which has been phenomenal so far. Our hope is that we have people tuning in all day long from 9 a.m. to late that night. It’s going to be a day to remember, that’s one thing we know for sure.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity