6 ms·

Amazon's internal numbers on Prime Video

40 points by edf13 9y ago

heartbreak 9y ago
> One big winner was the motoring series “The Grand Tour,” which stars the former presenters of BBC’s “Top Gear.” The show had more than 1.5 million first streams from Prime members worldwide, at a cost of $49 per subscriber in its first season. BBC handed Amazon a win on a silver platter. They didn't need a writer, they didn't need a producer, they just bought the ones that BBC threw out. How did Netflix miss on Andy Wilman and Jeremy Clarkson?
- swarnie_ 9y ago
  From what i understand they did speak to a lot of networks and streaming services. Amazon won because of the huge budget they offered and the promise of autonomy. It really does show as well. Some scenes in season one and two could never have been shown on the BBC.
- ascagnel_ 9y ago
  Amazon outbid Netflix, plain and simple. BBC had to toss Clarkson after he punched a producer.
- landonxjames 9y ago
  I saw rumors a few days ago that The Grand Tour has already been canceled after the already ordered season 3. Really hope it isn't true because it is one of the biggest draws of Prime Video for me.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    That rumor's coming from the Daily Mail, so I'd take it with an ocean's worth of salt until some sort of corroboration comes out elsewhere.
  - awiesenhofer 9y ago
    While I too hope it's just rumours I bet if it really happens netflix will snatch them up instantly. And if not we'll still have DRIVETRIBE.
  - AmVess 9y ago
    That would be no surprise. I used to be a big TG fan but didn't even finish this season. A lot of my friends used to be TG fans, and they've also quit watching. It's not too hard to believe that the C/H/M formula has run its course for a lot more people than just my small sphere of friends.
  - volkl48 9y ago
    The first season was Amazon's top draw (as this article indicates). The 2nd season seems to have largely been better received, not worse. Seems very, very unlikely that Amazon would be canceling a show with those circumstances. I could see the crew deciding to retire/stop doing the show, but I can't see Amazon canceling it.
- nothrabannosir 9y ago
  > BBC handed Amazon a win on a silver platter. Their hand was forced. Clarkson punched someone. They can’t just countenance physical violence because it’s a successful show. That would have had serious ramifications (rightfully so). For all intents and purposes: Clarkson left. He gambled, and won. But it was a gambit, and I doubt Amazon execs will be keen on taking hits themselves. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some circumspect wording in the contracts related to covering exactly that case :)
  - awiesenhofer 9y ago
    From watching two seasons of The Grand Tour there also seems to be a clause in the contracts similar to "Jeremy and Andy get to do anything they want" - which probably reduces the risk of someone being punched dramatically.
    - praneshp 9y ago
      The punch was not over creative differences, iirc. It was over a meal not being hot. Kind of the same risk nownas well, unless punching has been legalized :-)
  - volkl48 9y ago
    Amazon's basically just cutting a check to "W. Chump & Sons" (The production company Wilman, Clarkson, Hammond and May each have a 25% share in) for the show. They supposedly have very little to do with the actual making of the show. The BBC was more involved, from my understanding.
- TallGuyShort 9y ago
  I loved watching Top Gear and I generally like his politics, but even I wouldn't dare invest money in Clarkson with his history of behavior, even with a virtually guaranteed return.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Successful people are often volatile and impulsive. Not sure why that is but you see it in top executives, coaches, etc.
    - silverbax88 9y ago
      Those are just the ones you hear about. There are many successful people who aren't dysfunctional malcontents.
    - TallGuyShort 9y ago
      Doesn't remotely make it okay to hit people or change what I said.
- arachnophobe 9y ago
  And yet the BBC version of Top Gear is getting slated for 'just' 2.8 million viewers in the UK alone: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/top-gear-2017-ratings-episode-1-matt-leblanc_uk_58bd372ee4b0b99894188577 http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/top-gear-2017-ratings-... [Edit - this is for the 2017 series]
- pjc50 9y ago
  Slightly offtopic, but my favourite knockoff of Top Gear is neither of the two successor shows but one made on a tiny fraction of its budget: Air an Rathad. It has adorable levels of enthusiasm and beautiful scenery without any of the bombast. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fky8c http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fky8c
- jnty 9y ago
  Jeremy Clarkson had just assaulted a colleague following several other scandals, including racism rows. I assume they made a judgement that the reputational damage to their existing business wasn't worth it, whereas Amazon needed the boost.
THE_PUN_STOPS 9y ago
This is off topic, but why in the everloving eff are auto playing videos still standard on news sites in 2018?
- ams6110 9y ago
  If you're in Firefox, go to the about:config URL and set media.autoplay.enabled to false.
reaperducer 9y ago
The headline makes it sound like a huge number, but when you break it down, it's minuscule compared to traditional broadcast. The most recent Academy Awards show was the lowest rated in a decade, and it got 26 million people in what's called "live plus same day" which includes for people watching on their DVR's shortly after. That's 26 million people in just a few hours for one show in one country. Amazon's five million came from 19 shows, "airing" across an entire year, in however many countries have Amazon Video. If you were to break it down by same-day viewership, Amazon's ratings are lower than a local news show in a very small market. I'm not criticizing Amazon, at all. I'm a paying subscriber and think it, Netflix, and similar services are a better vision of the future than what the broadcast and cable nets have put together. But it's way too early to tout the death of the broadcast industry, as so many like to do. Also, The Grand Tour is awesome.
- malnourish 9y ago
  There's a small difference though, you don't need to pay to watch the Academy Awards (beyond owning a screen with a digital tuner).
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Or subscribing to cable. A lot of people can't get OTA. (In the case of the Oscars specifically you could get it from ABC online.)
- ghaff 9y ago
  In all fairness, this is about Prime Video drawing people into the overall Amazon ecosystem (shopping, etc.) That said, most if not all of this prestige television has quite law viewership relative to traditional broadcast TV. Game of Thrones has about 10 million viewers on HBO. That wouldn't be terrible by broadcast standards, but it's about equivalent to a reality show like Survivor.
- philfrasty 9y ago
  „tout the death of the broadcast industry“ Slightly OT: YouTube will be big in „live plus same day“ this year. Boxing match of KSI vs Joe Weller [1] drew 1.6 million live viewers and 16 Million on the (official) released video after. I'd estimate the announced fight of KSI vs Logan Paul in August to yield closer to 5 or up to 10 million live viewers with a massive „same day watching“ after. Sure the content is not for everyone but might be a glimpse at what a younger generation prefers. [1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5498574/youtube-stars-boxing-ksi-joe-weller/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5498574/youtube-stars-boxing-k...
rorykoehler 9y ago
I have both Prime and netflix. I can never find anything worth watching on prime. Netflix on the other hand is an ever replenishing repository of quality shows.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Netflix has an impending cliff with Fox pulling shows to make them Hulu exclusives and Disney putting together their own streaming service in 2019. They're doing a good job with their original content efforts, but I don't know if it'll be enough content quickly enough.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Not sure about Prime, but more and more of stuff on Netflix to me is great because it's available in French (and other) language or subtitle. Great for my multi-lingual family. I almost don't care what the content is (well as long as it's appropriate) as long as they're getting immersion while watching.
- _coveredInBees 9y ago
  I'm a bit surprised by that comment. I actually find Prime to have pretty good content and typically better movies than Netflix (who's movie library has been shrinking pretty drastically over the years). If you haven't already watched it, I'd highly recommend Season 1 and 2 of "The Expanse" on Prime. There are a lot of pretty great shows on there as long as you don't rely on DC/Marvel shows for all your entertainment. Other shows that are reasonably acclaimed are: - The Man in the High Castle - Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Nightmanager - Mr. Robot - Boardwalk Empire - Downton Abbey - Sneaky Pete - Orphan Black - Dr. Who - Veep - The Good Wife - Transparent - Hannibal - Deadwood - Curb your Enthusiasm - The Wire - Six Feet Under - The Sopranos
  - drak0n1c 9y ago
    The Expanse is great, both the book and the show. Smart of Amazon to pick it up.
  - 9y ago
physcab 9y ago
Amazon Prime LTV is on the order of thousands of dollars per member. If they can convert new customers to Prime for ~$100 that is pretty cheap. Of course, media is a hit driven business, so they would have to blend the cost of all the shows that don't do as well as their headliners. I personally don't like Prime shows other than Man in the High Castle. And they are increasingly pushing down other New Releases so you only see Prime shows above the fold on TV devices (Roku etc). But I understand they are playing the long game here and quality will probably improve. I used to dislike most of Netflix original shows, but now theres a steady lineup that I could watch regularly every week.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Both Netflix and Amazon seem to have come to the decision that, lots and lots of viewer data notwithstanding, predicting hits is really hard. (In all fairness, Amazon and Netflix are probably also content with niche content far more than traditional broadcast does.) So as they've established streaming original video, they seem to have gone more for throwing lots of things against the wall than going only for relatively surefire hits.
ams6110 9y ago
I have Amazon Prime but rarely watch anything in the video service. I find the UI to be horribly clunky, slow, and difficult to use. Maybe because my primary TV device is an old Wii console, but Netflix manages to provide a much better experience on the same device.
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  At least it doesn't auto-play trailers like Netflix does on my PS4. I spend very little time in their app as a result of that.
  - liveoneggs 9y ago
    funny because it (amazon video) auto plays trailers before shows on the iphone app
  - nkozyra 9y ago
    This decision was indeed perplexing. People don't like things that auto-play as a rule, I would be very surprised if this passed user testing. This and the parent comment lend themselves to a bigger concern of mine: services not always owning the UX. Either the services have to design multiple apps leading to the kind of inconsistencies that arise naturally from that or the devices have to use some API against whatever UI they happen to support. Basically, you have to re-learn these services depending on where you're playing them. I feel like Netflix has locked it down a bit but there's always smart TVs, media players, etc. that will never uniformly support a single UX for any given service.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      > "People don't like things that auto-play as a rule" Really? In amazon's case they auto play the next episode, so given that the user statyed up through the entire episode, that means they probably like that series and so like the next episode. Also I find YouTube autoplays to be more often than not to be enjoyable by me. And I discover new stuff I like that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
  - 9y ago
kodablah 9y ago
The headline on HN here of "Amazon.com Inc's top television shows drew more than 5M people worldwide" is misleading and makes you think of ratings. What it should say is "Amazon.com Inc's top television shows drew more than 5M to sign up for Prime". The difference is important.
- sctb 9y ago
  Thanks, we've reverted the submission title to that of the article.
reiichiroh 9y ago
Is Amazon Prime Music woefully small in the US as it seems to be in Canada? I tried it out and its "today's top hits" contains LAST YEAR's music (Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" + "Thunder" by Imagine Dragons and John Legends "All of You")
- dangrossman 9y ago
  A lot of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 (most aired and streamed songs in the past week) are over 6 months old, including "Thunder" at #19 and "Perfect" at #2. "Today's top hits" is not "today's newest songs".
  - ghaff 9y ago
    It's small compared to paid subscription offerings (or ad-supported free tiers of something like Spotify). Which means it basically works fine as background music but isn't great if you want to listen to specific things, especially current music.
- ConceptJunkie 9y ago
  It is. Amazon Prime Music's selection is dismal. I've discovered some great new music with it, but not a lot, and it takes a long time to filter through all the shovelware to find good stuff that I don't already own.
- r00fus 9y ago
  I get these titles in Apple Music daily playlists a lot too, so it's not just Amazon. I see topX lists as "what studios want you to listen to". Only Spotify's discover weekly seems interesting at all.

40 points by edf13 9y ago

> One big winner was the motoring series “The Grand Tour,” which stars the former presenters of BBC’s “Top Gear.” The show had more than 1.5 million first streams from Prime members worldwide, at a cost of $49 per subscriber in its first season. BBC handed Amazon a win on a silver platter. They didn't need a writer, they didn't need a producer, they just bought the ones that BBC threw out. How did Netflix miss on Andy Wilman and Jeremy Clarkson?

swarnie_ 9y ago
From what i understand they did speak to a lot of networks and streaming services. Amazon won because of the huge budget they offered and the promise of autonomy. It really does show as well. Some scenes in season one and two could never have been shown on the BBC.
ascagnel_ 9y ago
Amazon outbid Netflix, plain and simple. BBC had to toss Clarkson after he punched a producer.
landonxjames 9y ago
I saw rumors a few days ago that The Grand Tour has already been canceled after the already ordered season 3. Really hope it isn't true because it is one of the biggest draws of Prime Video for me.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  That rumor's coming from the Daily Mail, so I'd take it with an ocean's worth of salt until some sort of corroboration comes out elsewhere.
- awiesenhofer 9y ago
  While I too hope it's just rumours I bet if it really happens netflix will snatch them up instantly. And if not we'll still have DRIVETRIBE.
- AmVess 9y ago
  That would be no surprise. I used to be a big TG fan but didn't even finish this season. A lot of my friends used to be TG fans, and they've also quit watching. It's not too hard to believe that the C/H/M formula has run its course for a lot more people than just my small sphere of friends.
- volkl48 9y ago
  The first season was Amazon's top draw (as this article indicates). The 2nd season seems to have largely been better received, not worse. Seems very, very unlikely that Amazon would be canceling a show with those circumstances. I could see the crew deciding to retire/stop doing the show, but I can't see Amazon canceling it.
nothrabannosir 9y ago
> BBC handed Amazon a win on a silver platter. Their hand was forced. Clarkson punched someone. They can’t just countenance physical violence because it’s a successful show. That would have had serious ramifications (rightfully so). For all intents and purposes: Clarkson left. He gambled, and won. But it was a gambit, and I doubt Amazon execs will be keen on taking hits themselves. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some circumspect wording in the contracts related to covering exactly that case :)
- awiesenhofer 9y ago
  From watching two seasons of The Grand Tour there also seems to be a clause in the contracts similar to "Jeremy and Andy get to do anything they want" - which probably reduces the risk of someone being punched dramatically.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    The punch was not over creative differences, iirc. It was over a meal not being hot. Kind of the same risk nownas well, unless punching has been legalized :-)
- volkl48 9y ago
  Amazon's basically just cutting a check to "W. Chump & Sons" (The production company Wilman, Clarkson, Hammond and May each have a 25% share in) for the show. They supposedly have very little to do with the actual making of the show. The BBC was more involved, from my understanding.
TallGuyShort 9y ago
I loved watching Top Gear and I generally like his politics, but even I wouldn't dare invest money in Clarkson with his history of behavior, even with a virtually guaranteed return.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Successful people are often volatile and impulsive. Not sure why that is but you see it in top executives, coaches, etc.
  - silverbax88 9y ago
    Those are just the ones you hear about. There are many successful people who aren't dysfunctional malcontents.
  - TallGuyShort 9y ago
    Doesn't remotely make it okay to hit people or change what I said.
arachnophobe 9y ago
And yet the BBC version of Top Gear is getting slated for 'just' 2.8 million viewers in the UK alone: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/top-gear-2017-ratings-episode-1-matt-leblanc_uk_58bd372ee4b0b99894188577 http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/top-gear-2017-ratings-... [Edit - this is for the 2017 series]
pjc50 9y ago
Slightly offtopic, but my favourite knockoff of Top Gear is neither of the two successor shows but one made on a tiny fraction of its budget: Air an Rathad. It has adorable levels of enthusiasm and beautiful scenery without any of the bombast. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fky8c http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fky8c
jnty 9y ago
Jeremy Clarkson had just assaulted a colleague following several other scandals, including racism rows. I assume they made a judgement that the reputational damage to their existing business wasn't worth it, whereas Amazon needed the boost.

THE_PUN_STOPS 9y ago

This is off topic, but why in the everloving eff are auto playing videos still standard on news sites in 2018?

ams6110 9y ago
If you're in Firefox, go to the about:config URL and set media.autoplay.enabled to false.

reaperducer 9y ago

The headline makes it sound like a huge number, but when you break it down, it's minuscule compared to traditional broadcast. The most recent Academy Awards show was the lowest rated in a decade, and it got 26 million people in what's called "live plus same day" which includes for people watching on their DVR's shortly after. That's 26 million people in just a few hours for one show in one country. Amazon's five million came from 19 shows, "airing" across an entire year, in however many countries have Amazon Video. If you were to break it down by same-day viewership, Amazon's ratings are lower than a local news show in a very small market. I'm not criticizing Amazon, at all. I'm a paying subscriber and think it, Netflix, and similar services are a better vision of the future than what the broadcast and cable nets have put together. But it's way too early to tout the death of the broadcast industry, as so many like to do. Also, The Grand Tour is awesome.

malnourish 9y ago
There's a small difference though, you don't need to pay to watch the Academy Awards (beyond owning a screen with a digital tuner).
- ghaff 9y ago
  Or subscribing to cable. A lot of people can't get OTA. (In the case of the Oscars specifically you could get it from ABC online.)
ghaff 9y ago
In all fairness, this is about Prime Video drawing people into the overall Amazon ecosystem (shopping, etc.) That said, most if not all of this prestige television has quite law viewership relative to traditional broadcast TV. Game of Thrones has about 10 million viewers on HBO. That wouldn't be terrible by broadcast standards, but it's about equivalent to a reality show like Survivor.
philfrasty 9y ago
„tout the death of the broadcast industry“ Slightly OT: YouTube will be big in „live plus same day“ this year. Boxing match of KSI vs Joe Weller [1] drew 1.6 million live viewers and 16 Million on the (official) released video after. I'd estimate the announced fight of KSI vs Logan Paul in August to yield closer to 5 or up to 10 million live viewers with a massive „same day watching“ after. Sure the content is not for everyone but might be a glimpse at what a younger generation prefers. [1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5498574/youtube-stars-boxing-ksi-joe-weller/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5498574/youtube-stars-boxing-k...

rorykoehler 9y ago

I have both Prime and netflix. I can never find anything worth watching on prime. Netflix on the other hand is an ever replenishing repository of quality shows.

ceejayoz 9y ago
Netflix has an impending cliff with Fox pulling shows to make them Hulu exclusives and Disney putting together their own streaming service in 2019. They're doing a good job with their original content efforts, but I don't know if it'll be enough content quickly enough.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Not sure about Prime, but more and more of stuff on Netflix to me is great because it's available in French (and other) language or subtitle. Great for my multi-lingual family. I almost don't care what the content is (well as long as it's appropriate) as long as they're getting immersion while watching.
_coveredInBees 9y ago
I'm a bit surprised by that comment. I actually find Prime to have pretty good content and typically better movies than Netflix (who's movie library has been shrinking pretty drastically over the years). If you haven't already watched it, I'd highly recommend Season 1 and 2 of "The Expanse" on Prime. There are a lot of pretty great shows on there as long as you don't rely on DC/Marvel shows for all your entertainment. Other shows that are reasonably acclaimed are: - The Man in the High Castle - Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Nightmanager - Mr. Robot - Boardwalk Empire - Downton Abbey - Sneaky Pete - Orphan Black - Dr. Who - Veep - The Good Wife - Transparent - Hannibal - Deadwood - Curb your Enthusiasm - The Wire - Six Feet Under - The Sopranos
- drak0n1c 9y ago
  The Expanse is great, both the book and the show. Smart of Amazon to pick it up.
- 9y ago

physcab 9y ago

Amazon Prime LTV is on the order of thousands of dollars per member. If they can convert new customers to Prime for ~$100 that is pretty cheap. Of course, media is a hit driven business, so they would have to blend the cost of all the shows that don't do as well as their headliners. I personally don't like Prime shows other than Man in the High Castle. And they are increasingly pushing down other New Releases so you only see Prime shows above the fold on TV devices (Roku etc). But I understand they are playing the long game here and quality will probably improve. I used to dislike most of Netflix original shows, but now theres a steady lineup that I could watch regularly every week.

ghaff 9y ago
Both Netflix and Amazon seem to have come to the decision that, lots and lots of viewer data notwithstanding, predicting hits is really hard. (In all fairness, Amazon and Netflix are probably also content with niche content far more than traditional broadcast does.) So as they've established streaming original video, they seem to have gone more for throwing lots of things against the wall than going only for relatively surefire hits.

ams6110 9y ago

I have Amazon Prime but rarely watch anything in the video service. I find the UI to be horribly clunky, slow, and difficult to use. Maybe because my primary TV device is an old Wii console, but Netflix manages to provide a much better experience on the same device.

jschwartzi 9y ago
At least it doesn't auto-play trailers like Netflix does on my PS4. I spend very little time in their app as a result of that.
- liveoneggs 9y ago
  funny because it (amazon video) auto plays trailers before shows on the iphone app
- nkozyra 9y ago
  This decision was indeed perplexing. People don't like things that auto-play as a rule, I would be very surprised if this passed user testing. This and the parent comment lend themselves to a bigger concern of mine: services not always owning the UX. Either the services have to design multiple apps leading to the kind of inconsistencies that arise naturally from that or the devices have to use some API against whatever UI they happen to support. Basically, you have to re-learn these services depending on where you're playing them. I feel like Netflix has locked it down a bit but there's always smart TVs, media players, etc. that will never uniformly support a single UX for any given service.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    > "People don't like things that auto-play as a rule" Really? In amazon's case they auto play the next episode, so given that the user statyed up through the entire episode, that means they probably like that series and so like the next episode. Also I find YouTube autoplays to be more often than not to be enjoyable by me. And I discover new stuff I like that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
- 9y ago

kodablah 9y ago

The headline on HN here of "Amazon.com Inc's top television shows drew more than 5M people worldwide" is misleading and makes you think of ratings. What it should say is "Amazon.com Inc's top television shows drew more than 5M to sign up for Prime". The difference is important.

sctb 9y ago
Thanks, we've reverted the submission title to that of the article.

reiichiroh 9y ago

Is Amazon Prime Music woefully small in the US as it seems to be in Canada? I tried it out and its "today's top hits" contains LAST YEAR's music (Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" + "Thunder" by Imagine Dragons and John Legends "All of You")

dangrossman 9y ago
A lot of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 (most aired and streamed songs in the past week) are over 6 months old, including "Thunder" at #19 and "Perfect" at #2. "Today's top hits" is not "today's newest songs".
- ghaff 9y ago
  It's small compared to paid subscription offerings (or ad-supported free tiers of something like Spotify). Which means it basically works fine as background music but isn't great if you want to listen to specific things, especially current music.
ConceptJunkie 9y ago
It is. Amazon Prime Music's selection is dismal. I've discovered some great new music with it, but not a lot, and it takes a long time to filter through all the shovelware to find good stuff that I don't already own.
r00fus 9y ago
I get these titles in Apple Music daily playlists a lot too, so it's not just Amazon. I see topX lists as "what studios want you to listen to". Only Spotify's discover weekly seems interesting at all.