Streaming video teardown: Twitch vs. Amazon Prime for Thursday Night Football

Amazon and Twitch have both implemented different technology stacks for streaming Thursday Night Football. Amazon uses MPEG DASH with H.264 encoding in 2-second fMP4 fragments, while Twitch employs Apple HLS format with the same codecs. Both services use Widevine and Playready for content protection and manifest manipulation-based server-side ad insertion (SSAI). Amazon uses AWS Elemental MediaPackage for packaging and Elemental MediaTailor for SSAI, while Twitch has its own in-house encoder and CDN. The key difference between the two services is that Twitch's architecture enables a significantly lower latency stream compared to Amazon's approach.