After Amazon’s Emmy Shutout, Can the Everything Store Still Become the Everything Streaming Service?

By Scott Porch Twitter @scottporch
Published Sep. 19, 2017, 8:00 a.m. ET

As it turned out, Amazon’s decision to forego its annual post-Emmy party Sunday night was a good call.

At its parties after the 2015 and 2016 Primetime Emmy Awards, Amazon and its Amazon Studios celebrated Jeffrey Tambor’s wins for outstanding actor in a comedy for Transparent and wins in assorted technical categories. This year there was nothing to celebrate, as Amazon failed to win a single Emmy.

Meanwhile, streaming rivals HBO, Netflix and Hulu walked away with two-thirds of the 27 Emmys that were awarded Sunday night and all of the big ones, including outstanding drama (Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale), comedy (HBO’s Veep), limited series (HBO’s Big Little Lies) and movie (Black Mirror: San Junipero).

And, as the Emmy hype recedes, the news for Amazon doesn’t get any better.

If HBO, Netflix and Amazon are locked into a race for worldwide streaming supremacy, HBO and Netflix are leagues ahead in awards recognition but also in their breadth and volume of original programming, the cultural capital that comes with a massive global hit like HBO’s Game of Thrones, and — most importantly — in subscriber totals.

On that measure, Amazon is desperately behind:

  • HBO had 134 million worldwide subscribers at the end of 2016 and, with Game of Thrones, the most-watched show of 2017. HBO will soon be the crown jewel of new corporate owner AT&T, which aims to put it on every AT&T smartphone and DirecTV and DirecTV Now subscriber’s TV.
  • Netflix had 108 million worldwide subscribers at the end of June and massive pop-culture breakthroughs over the last year with The Crown, Master of None, Marvel’s Iron Fist and 13 Reasons Why. Netflix has significantly broadened its distribution this year in deals that make it available on Comcast’s Xfinity X1 set-top box and for free on T-Mobile family plans.
  • Amazon, which doesn’t tout or even comment on its number of Amazon Prime memberships, has — by one analyst’s estimate — 65 million worldwide subscribers. Although there is no Nielsen-like measurement of viewing across the various streaming services and provide an objective measure of shows, Amazon doesn’t appear to have a marque show to rival any of 20-plus shows on HBO, Netflix, Starz, Showtime, FX and AMC, and certainly has nothing on the level of Game of Thrones.

Amazon isn’t just behind in global streaming. It’s way, way, way behind.

“Amazon is spending a lot of money and not getting that same return that Netflix is,” Hollywood Reporter editorial director Matt Belloni said last week on KCRW’s The Business podcast. Netflix is spending $6 billion on original and licensed programming this year and has much more to show for it than Amazon does for its $4.5 billion. “You had Transparent at Amazon, which was a breakout from a critic’s perspective, but not much else.”

A few weeks ago, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos signaled a major shift in Amazon’s programming strategy from Little Literary Shows That Could like Zelda Fitzgerald biopic Z: The Beginning of Everything and F. Scott Fitzgerald adaptation The Last Tycoon to Big Shows That Damn Well Better like, well, nothing on Amazon’s current roster. Bezos has asked Amazon Studios chief Roy Price to shift his focus from modestly budgeted boutique comedies and high-brow period dramas to what Price called “big shows that can make the biggest difference around the world.”

The good news: Amazon made significant inroads globally with The Grand Tour, a globe-trotting reality show about fast cars and Prime Video’s biggest swing to date. Amazon committed $200 million over three seasons to lure the team behind the long-running BBC Two series Top Gear, which airs in 200-plus countries and has an estimated 350 million worldwide viewers, to launch the new series.

On Google Trends, which measures search traffic and is a fairly reliable indicator of overall interest in a topic, Top Gear (the blue line) had its highest peak ever for the May 2016 season premiere that featured its new hosts, and The Grand Tour (the red line) had a respectable peak in November 2016 for its series premiere on Amazon.

The bad news: The Grand Tour is Amazon Prime Video’s biggest noise-maker globally and barely registers when compared over that same period to HBO’s Game of Thrones and Netflix’s Stranger Things, which, according to Google Trends data, is likely its most-watched original show. (Netflix does not publicly disclose its viewing data but has cited Google Trends favorably in its quarterly earnings announcements.) In fact, Stranger Things is dwarfed by Game of Thrones and still towers over The Grand Tour.

“I do think Game of Thrones is to TV as Jaws and Star Wars was to the movies of the 1970s,” Price told Variety. “It’ll inspire a lot of people. Everybody wants a big hit and certainly that’s the show of the moment in terms of being a model for a hit.” Or as Richard Rushfield wrote in The Ankler entertainment business newsletter last week: “Jeff Bezos is now declaring the entertainment equivalent of ‘Kill them all!’ Nothing less than matching the biggest thing in all entertainment will do. Get me one of those!”

Amazon wants a show with dragons or wizards or zombies or whatever will get people talking about Amazon. Driving home that point, Amazon last week cancelled two shows — Z: The Beginning of Everything and The Last Tycoon — a pair of polite, bookish (and blindingly white) dramas that would have been more comfortable with the bookseller Amazon of a decade ago than the Amazon of 2017 whose defining brands are Alexa (the best AI voice assistant in the business), Fire TV Edition (the best smart TV on the market) and Whole Foods (the most advanced avocado distribution system ever devised).

The company’s new growth model for Prime Video, Amazon’s Price told Variety, is to create shows that are designed for global appeal, and Price cited Amazon’s The Grand Tour (shot on location all over the world), The Man in the High Castle (a high-concept drama with an international cast) and The Tick (a glossy superhero comedy). None of those shows command Game of Thrones levels of attention, but neither does anything else. Amazon has to walk before it can run and is counting on those factors — international locations, international cast, recognizable brands — to build a big-time show.

To compete globally with HBO and Netflix, which have dozens of original shows and deep TV and film catalogs, and grow its global prime video subscriber base from 64 million to 100 million or more, Amazon will need to be more than a one-big-hit wonder. It has the beginnings of that with bawdy Brit-coms (Catastrophe and Fleabag), solid crime dramas (Bosch and Sneaky Pete), original films (Oscar winner Manchester by the Sea and this fall’s The Big Sick) and — in what has become a legit brand for Prime Video — respected, prestige-y half-hour dramedies (Mozart in the Jungle, One Mississippi, I Love Dick and Transparent).

Amazon has given a straight-to-series order for a period crime drama called Tong Wars to be written by Paul Attanasio (Bull, Homicide: Life on the Street) and directed by Wong Kar-wai (In the Mood for Love) that will apparently be based on the Chinese gang wars that occurred in the late 1800s in the Chinatown districts of San Francisco and other big U.S. cities.

Amazon has also recently ordered a half-hour comedy series starring Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph and signed a development deal for Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s comic book adaptation The Boys that would be a straight-to-series order if its goes forward.

That’s in addition to the shows that Amazon has already scheduled or has in production:

  • Tin Star, a thriller starring Tim Roth and Christina Hendricks that premieres September 29,
  • Lore, a horror anthology series that premieres October 13,
  • Carnival Row, a Victorian drama starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne,
  • Good Omens, a Neil Gaiman and BBC co-production starring Michael Sheen and David Tenant,
  • Homecoming, a psychological thriller starring Julia Roberts,
  • The Romanoffs, Matthew Weiner’s follow-up to Mad Men, and
  • an as-yet-untitled, $160 million, two-season, crime drama series from David O. Russell starring Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore.

Plus, Amazon has a one-season, $50 million deal to air 10 NFL Thursday Night Football games — starting with the Chicago Bears at the Green Bay Packers on September 28 — plus an 11th game on Christmas Day. If that goes well, Amazon will almost certainly look to renew that package for 2018 and beyond and could contend for ESPN’s Monday Night Football package, which expires after the 2021 season, or some part of the CBS/FOX/NBC package that expires after the 2022 season.

Amazon’s Prime Video lineup is already stronger in many international markets than in the United States because Amazon in an international distributor for many U.S. studios. The Prime Video lineup in the U.K., for example, includes the Starz’s American Gods and Outlander, AMC’s The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, FX’s Preacher, and will include the upcoming CBS All Access series Star Trek: Discovery.

A few global hits of its own would help cement Amazon as a global brand and not just a distributor of other companies’ stuff, but Star Trek: Discovery could conceivably be Amazon’s breakthrough hit even without a spot on Amazon’s U.S. Prime Video lineup. CBS All Access is not currently available on the Amazon Channels service, but CBS-owned Showtime is and I wouldn’t be too surprised to see CBS All Access there at some point.

Amazon Channels, which allows Prime Video subscribers to add premium channels onto their service, has itself become a growth business for Amazon. Analyst Richard Greenfield noted in June that more than half of HBO, Starz and Showtime’s digital subscribers are subscribing through — and splitting revenue with — Amazon Channels. Amazon has two of its own add-on channels in Heera (Bollywood movies) and Anime Strike (Japanese anime), and NBC News reported Monday that Amazon is looking to buy a few smaller cable channels to go with them.

Amazon would need to double its Prime Video subscriber base to get the same bang for its TV buck as HBO and Netflix, which both generate billions more than Amazon in subscriber fees that they can spend on bigger catalogs and flashier shows. If Amazon wants to play on the big stage, it will need more and bigger shows but also simply more — more foreign-language dramas, more documentary series, more stand-up specials, more talk shows and more everything else that HBO and Netflix are doing.

The conventional wisdom today is that Amazon Prime is a two-day shipping service that provides Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Reading, etc., merely as bonus features. Amazon is aiming to transform itself into something closer to a lifestyle brand that includes TVs, gadgets, groceries and a top-tier streaming service.

Amazon has spent its entire business life investing heavily in distribution, R&D and customer acquisition, and the recent signals from Amazon executives are that streaming is a big growth target. I’m skeptical that Tong Wars or The Boys — or anything — will give Amazon and Amazon Studios a Game of Thrones-sized hit or an Emmy for outstanding drama, but I’ll enjoy watching them try.

“Alexa, send more popcorn.”

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.