Amazon Prime Video has acquired Bray Film Studios, the historic U.K. studio complex where The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power filmed its second season.

Amazon did not reveal how much it paid for the facility, which includes nearly 54,000 square feet of production space across five stages.

Amazon MGM Studios plans to produce both new and returning content at the studio site.

“With Bray as our creative home in the UK, we are committed to deepening our relationships with the UK creative community, which is rich with world-class storytellers and creative talent of all kinds,” said Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios. “The acquisition of a studio with such a storied heritage not only empowers us to produce more film and television in the UK, but also unveils a wealth of opportunities in the local community with respect to jobs and skills training at all levels of the production process.”

Bray is just the second UK production site to be owned and operate by a U.S. studio, after Warner Bros. acquired Watford-based Leavesden Studios in 2010.

The purchase marks Amazon’s second studio presence in the U.K. (alongside its long-term contract at Shepperton Studios), with Bray set to serve as the film site for the second season of the Russo Brothers’ Citadel in September.

The studio facility, located about 26 miles from central London in Berkshire, saw a period of inactivity from 2010-2017 before reopening to film the BBC series Bodyguard.

Bray Studios has since hosted projects including Rocketman, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, The King’s Man, in addition to its classic titles like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Mummy, and Ridley Scott's Alien.

The news comes just six months after Amazon submitted a written proposal to the U.K. Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee, urging the British government not to impose policy changes or additional costs on the production landscape.

“It’s important for policymakers to appreciate that it’s much easier to change the location of a production than it is to relocate for other parts of the economy,” Amazon said in its letter.

Fallout, Amazon Prime Video’s latest big-budget TV series effort, has quietly emerged as the platform’s biggest premiere audience draw of all time. 

While conceding the adaptation of a popular video game is “one of the service’s top three most-watched titles ever” as it renewed the show for season two just nine days after its April 10 premiere, Amazon would not provide first-party audience performance data. 

For its part, Penske Media Group research company Luminate said Fallout drew 2.5 billion viewing minutes in the U.S. in its first full week of release, April 12-18. That was around three times as much viewing engagement as the second-ranked show on Luminate’s ranker, Netflix’s Unlocked: A Jail Experiment.

Meanwhile, a PlumResearch data analysis puts first-week U.S.-only viewership for the post-apocalyptic action series, produced at a reported first-season budget of $153 million, at as high as 53 million views and 47 million streaming hours from April 11-15.

That makes Fallout Amazon’s most successful U.S. TV premiere of all time, PlumResearch said, adding that the previous best week for an original was the 28 million views garnered by The Boys during the week of its July 2022 season finale.

PlumResearch said Fallout, which is also available globally, currently occupies around 30% of viewing time in “most” international markets. In the top 15 markets, it generated 91 million viewing hours and 102 million views, the researcher claims. 

The same data suggests that the series is drawing viewers back to Prime Video to complete the eight-episode first season, with 9.7 million U.S. Prime profiles tuning back in to watch. That’s the streamer’s biggest yield of returning customers yet, according to PlumResearch.

“Fallout has clearly been a resounding success for Prime, receiving widespread acclaim and almost instant renewal for season 2,” Plum research director Jonathan Broughton said in a statement. “While the viewing across the first few days of the series has been unprecedented, reaching as high as 45% in some markets, it does remain to be seen how this plays out longer term.”

Unlike Reacher and other Prime Video original shows, Fallout dropped all of its eight episodes at once, breaking a sequential, week-by-week pattern adopted in recent years for series including The Boys, The Wheel of Time and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

That likely had much to do with the initial surge in viewership, as collective viewing for Fallout’s first season has already made it the streamer’s second most-viewed property of the year, behind Reacher.

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday sued Amazon for allegedly tricking millions of customers into its Prime program, then ‘trapping’ them into the subscription service by making it prohibitively difficult to cancel. 

The heavily redacted suit, filed in a U.S. District Court in Seattle, is available here. The FTC also issued a press release on the matter Wednesday morning. 

In its complaint, the FTC said Amazon has used so-called dark patterns to lure customers into the Prime program, which offers members subsidized shipping on purchased goods, not to mention the Amazon Prime Video subscription-VOD smorgasbord. 

Dark patterns are user interface schemes designed to take advantage of inherent psychological biases and lead users toward making certain choices. 

"During Amazon’s online checkout process, consumers were faced with numerous opportunities to subscribe to Amazon Prime at $14.99/month," the FTC said in its press release. "In many cases, the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult for consumers to locate."

Once enrolled in a recurring Prime subscription, Amazon made it exceedingly difficult to cancel the service. Not only was finding where to start the cancellation process challenging, but users are also faced with numerous redirects and confusing follow-up steps. 

“Amazon tricked and trapped people into recurring subscriptions without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them significant money,” FTC chair Lina M. Khan said in a statement. “These manipulative tactics harm consumers and law-abiding businesses alike. The FTC will continue to vigorously protect Americans from ‘dark patterns’ and other unfair or deceptive practices in digital markets.”

For her part, Kahn achieved much of her profile after she penned a 2017 legal paper titled "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox."

Meanwhile, the FTC is cracking down more broadly on dark pattern usage by large internet companies. For example, Fortnite maker Epic Games agreed in December to pay $520 million to settle an FTC suit against it for allegedly tricking users into buying in-game trinkets.

Amazon, which already streams Thursday night National Football League games, will add a game on Black Friday next season.

Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days during the holiday season, creating a big commerce opportunity for Amazon Prime Video. 

The game is set to appear at 3 p.m. ET on November 24, 2023, the day after Thanksgiving. 

“Thanksgiving is synonymous with football, and we’re excited to give our fans another day of NFL action during this holiday weekend,” said Hans Schroeder, chief operating officer for NFL Media. “Amazon is uniquely positioned to partner with us for this game as ‘Black Friday’ is one of the most important days of the year for their business.”

So far this season, Thursday Night Football on Prime Video is averaging 10.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen, down from last year when it was on Fox. But viewing is up among young viewers, posting a 38% gain among 18-to-34-year-olds.

“Thursday Night Football has already proven tremendously successful on Prime Video, delivering millions of viewers every week, and we’re excited to expand our relationship with the NFL with the inaugural ‘Black Friday’ game, starting next year,” Prime Video global head of sports Jay Marine said. “ ’Black Friday’ is the unofficial start of the holiday season, and we’re thrilled to kick it off with a gift for football fans across the country with this new game.” ■

While Netflix's volatile stock price jumps back and forth on the quarterly whims of a few million global subscribers, Amazon Prime Video's customer metrics remain shielded under the larger Amazon Prime umbrella. 

Certainly, some price-sensitive U.S. customers must have bolted Amazon Prime in February, when the annual price of the broader free-shipping service shot up from $119 to $139. 

Now, Amazon Prime members across Europe are feeling the pain. In Germany, Amazon Prime's second largest market, the annual price is going up 30% to 89.90 euros, ($91.88). And in Prime's third largest market, the UK, the price is increasing 20% to 95 pounds ($114.47). Price increases across Spain, Italy and France, meanwhile, range from 39% - 43%. 

Amazon ties its price hikes to "increased inflation and operating costs," adding, "We will keep working to ensure Prime offers exceptional value for members."

Amazon said in 2020 that 200 million members worldwide subscribe to Amazon Prime, and that it expects to have 240 million members by 2026. It hasn't disclosed how many of those members regularly use the Amazon Prime Video subscription service that comes with free shipping of goods. 

Almost certainly, when Amazon reports its second-quarter earnings Thursday, it's stock price won't fluctuate based on Prime Video performance. 

Netflix stock, which enjoyed a brief respite from its January 20 decline after two big investors snapped up a large amount of shares, is down again this week, a combination of fear, looming price increases and analyst reports.

Netflix stock took a double-digit nosedive after it released Q4 earnings after hours on Jan. 20. The next day, shares in the SVOD pioneer dropped 25% to $397.50 each and pundits were claiming that the tide was shifting away from the company that basically invented the subscription streaming video business. 

A few days later, on January 27, Netflix shares rose 10% after it was revealed that hedge fund guru William Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management said his fund purchased $1 billion in Netflix stock on January 21, boosting confidence in the company once again. Later, on January 31, Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings said in an Securities and Exchange Commission filing that he bought about $20 million in Netflix stock, which drove the shares up another 11.1% to $427.14 each. The thought was that Netflix stock had weathered the storm, that investors saw the intrinsic value in the company and its business and the stock would return to normal. Netflix shares closed at $457.13 on February 1, up 7% each. 

But it didn’t last long. Netflix shares began to slide and by February 2  fell 6% to $429.48 each. By February 4, the stock was down to $410.17, amid growing fears that Netflix had run its course, that despite spending $19 billion on content, releasing some of the most talked-about programming last year -- Squid Games, anyone? --  no one wanted to watch it anymore.

Also: What $19 Billion Gets You: Netflix Previews Entire 2022 Film Slate 

Those fears were somewhat founded in reality -- subscriber growth was down despite the release of popular programming -- but what got lost in the panic was that every streaming service was experiencing a growth slowdown. Disney Plus, HBO Max and Peacock all added fewer customers in Q4 than in the past. But Netflix was singled out because it spends the most on content and had been considered to be the unstoppable force of streaming TV. 

Shares were down again Monday to $402.10 after Needham & Co. media analyst Laura Martin issued a report claiming that only half of Netflix subscribers were satisfied with the service despite having its strongest content year ever, and 41% say they are more likely to jettison the service this year. Martin surveyed 504 Netflix subscribers in the U.S. (the service has more than 75 million domestic customers) and concluded if the SVOD pioneer wants to stop the bleeding, it has to add an advertising tier, buy an old media library to improve its content ROICs and/or sell out. 

“Netflix can NOT win the ‘streaming wars’ given its current strategy, we believe,” Martin wrote.

Shares have slowly inched back up in the past two days -- they closed at $403.53 on February, 8 and were priced at $404.09 on Wednesday afternoon, but they’re still far short of the $508.22 per share benchmark of about two weeks ago. 

This could truly be another example of the roller coaster ride that comes with being a Netflix shareholder. The stock has historically had big ups and big downs, usually around subscriber news, and maybe this is no different. But something just feels a little more off this time.

For one, there is a lot more competition on the streaming side than there was just a few years ago. Secondly, everybody is experiencing some kind of subscriber slowdown. Thirdly, all indications are that people are watching more video than they ever have, but if they aren’t watching streamers and are increasingly cutting the pay TV cord, what are they watching, video games? 

Or maybe the other explanation is that they are moving toward free ad-supported services like Pluto TV, Tubi and the like. Tubi already predicted that AVOD subscribers will surpass SVOD subscribers later this year. Maybe pricing really is becoming more and more important. 

But whatever it is, providers should take notice, because investors are. Disney Plus parent The Walt Disney Co.’s  stock was down about 5% between January 20 and February 9 and HBO Max parent AT&T fell 12% in the same timeframe, partly because of the fears around streaming.

While Disney seemed to reverse the slowdown in fiscal Q1 -- adding about 11.8 million Disney Plus subscribers, well ahead of consensus and driving its stock up 5.5% early February 10 -- some analysts pointed to possible weakness ahead.  

Fiscal Q1 was helped by new content releases, including the three-part Beatles documentary Get Back, and new programming could help accelerate subscriber growth beyond Q1 levels. But Barclays media analyst Kannan Venkateshwar worried that it may not be enough to get the service back on track to its previous guidance levels. Disney reiterated its guidance of 230 million to 250 million Disney Plus subscribers by 2024. 

“Next quarter may be a trough both seasonally as well as in terms of footprint expansion and content releases,” Venkateshwar wrote. “Q3 will see launches in 40 new territories in addition to tailwind from the IPL [Indian Premier League cricket] in India, which should add to growth, but Q4 will likely bear the bulk of the growth load due to release calendar. Given this cadence, the company may not be able to fully get back to its guidance trendline this year despite strong fiscal Q1.”  

Attracting the most attention from Martin’s survey is that 41% of respondents said they were “more likely to churn” from Netflix in 2022 because of the price increases. Take that with however big a grain of salt you want -- there’s a huge difference between “I probably will cancel”  and “I just cancelled.” But it does cast some shadow on what in the past has been the gold standard for streaming. Martin’s survey also suggests that 70% of respondents say they won’t pay for additional streaming services in 2022, which doesn’t bode well for the remainder of the streamer-verse. 

In her report, Martin wrote the “clear learnings” from the survey were: (1) That consumers believe they’ve watched “everything” Netflix had to offer during the pandemic of 2020 and 2021, and there was “nothing” on rival services like Discovery  Plus and Peacock. “Better to pay for new services than old,” she wrote; and  (2) Netflix still doesn’t offer a lower priced ad-supported tier like most of its competitors, meaning that “consumers that disconnect Netflix can replace it with 2 or 3 different streaming services for an identical monthly fee.”

Martin has been a sharp critic of Netflix in the past, and has called for a lower cost, ad-supported tier ever since Disney Plus came on the scene in 2019 at a $6.99 monthly price point.

Netflix management has been adamant in its resistance to including ads in programming in the past. And maybe all it will take is another popular movie or show or series or whatever to bring people back to the fold. But the fold is a lot different than it was in the past, and most of Netflix’s competition has either raised prices, included an ad-supported tier or both as a result. (FYI, I am leaving Amazon Prime Video, which said it will raise its annual charges by about 32% this year, out of the mix  because the vast majority of subscribers pay for the free shipping, not the video.)  

HBO Max launched in 2020 at $14.99 per month and last year introduced an ad-supported version at $9.99 per month. NBCUniversal launched Peacock nationwide in July 2020; Paramount Plus launched in 2021 with limited ads for $5 per month; and Discovery Plus launched in 2021 at $4.99 per month with ads.

Netflix has raised prices about 6 times since it launched its streaming video version in 2011 -- in 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2022. Each time there was a fear of a massive subscriber exodus that never came. But this time may be different. There are a lot more choices for consumers on the streaming video front. 

Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings has said that he believes Netflix will weather this storm as it always has -- by providing more compelling content. Netflix spends more than any other service on streaming content -- $19 billion this year -- and last week previewed its entire movie slate for 2022. But more shows may not be the answer. Netflix had its most watched show ever -- Squid Games -- in September and still managed to disappoint regarding subscriber growth. And this year it said it expects Q1 subscriber additions to be about 2.5 million, its lowest growth in years. And Q1 is usually one of the company’s biggest growth quarters. 

By their very nature surveys are worded in a way to find out what people are going to do, not what they’ve done. And when those questions are put to people while the wounds of a price increase are still fresh, or shortly after they've binge-watched a show and don’t think they’ll ever be anything else to watch, the answers are usually pretty harsh. Wait a week and cooler heads usually prevail. 

That could very well be the case here. People are ticked off about another price increase, there are a lot of other lower cost choices around and none of them require long-term contracts, so people can drop them and sign up with abandon. But it does raise questions about streaming, which is turning out to be a lot like its predecessors in the video entertainment business, just trying to figure out the most convenient, cost-efficient way to deliver content to people who want it. Only time will tell who will come up with the formula that satisfies everyone's needs best. ■

Amazon Prime has ordered season two of Reacher, days after the series premiered. The show, adapted from the Lee Child franchise of novels, debuted February 4. Alan Ritchson plays Reacher. 

“The phenomenal debut of Reacher is a testament to Lee Child’s creation of one of entertainment’s most well-known heroes, Nick Santora’s original approach to the storytelling, Alan’s brilliant embodiment of the character, and the dedication of the talented people who worked tirelessly in front of and behind the camera to make such an undeniably binge-worthy series,” said Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios. “The global impact of Reacher makes it one of Prime Video’s biggest series debuts, and we can’t wait to bring fans a second season of their new favorite show.”

Child is an executive producer. Nick Santora is executive producer and showrunner. Don Granger and Scott Sullivan also executive produce, with David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Bill Bost for Skydance.

The first season follows Jack Reacher, a veteran military police investigator who has just recently entered civilian life. Reacher is a drifter, carrying no phone and the bare essentials as he travels the country and explores the nation he once served. When Reacher arrives in the small town of Margrave, Georgia, he finds a community grappling with its first homicide in 20 years. The cops arrest him and eyewitnesses claim to place Reacher at the scene of the crime. While he works to prove his innocence, a deep-seated conspiracy emerges. 

Season one is based on the Child novel Killing Floor. The cast includes Malcolm Goodwin, Willa Fitzgerald and Chris Webster. 

“The entire Reacher team—cast, production, writers, etc.—is so happy with the wonderful reception the show has received,” said Santora. “Amazon, Skydance and Paramount have been such fantastic partners and everyone is excited to roll up their sleeves and get to work on what will be a great season two.”

The show  is produced by Amazon Studios, Skydance Television and Paramount TV Studios. ■

Season two of sci-fi comedy Upload is on Amazon Prime March 11. Greg Daniels created the show, set in a technologically advanced future where hologram phones, 3D food printers and automated grocery stores are the norm, and humans can choose to be “uploaded” into a virtual afterlife. 

Season one depicted a young app developer, Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell), who winds up in the hospital following a self-driving car accident, needing to quickly decide his fate. After a rushed deliberation with shallow girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), he chooses to be uploaded to her family’s luxurious virtual afterlife, known as “Lakeview.” Once in Lakeview, Nathan meets his customer service “Angel” Nora Anthony (Andy Allo), who becomes his friend and confidante.

Season two sees Nathan is at a crossroads in his (after) life. Ingrid has unexpectedly arrived at Lakeview hoping to strengthen their relationship, but his heart still secretly yearns for Nora. Nora, meanwhile, is off the grid and involved with the anti-tech rebel group “The Ludds.” 

“Season two is packed with new near-future concepts, including Lakeview’s newest in-app digital baby program called ‘prototykes,’ and other satirical glimpses of the technological advances and headaches to come,” according to Amazon Prime. 

Howard Klein executive produces alongside Daniels.

Daniels' credits include The Office, King of the Hill and Parks and Recreation. ■

Senior content producer Michael Malone chats with As We See It showrunner Jason Katims. The series, about three young-adult roommates with autism, premieres on Amazon Prime January 21.

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Amazon hit the mark with its expensive series adaptation of fantasy novel series The Wheel of Time.

The first three episodes of The Wheel of Time, which posted on Amazon Prime Video on Nov. 19, generated 1.163 billion minutes of viewing time in the U.S., according to Nielsen. 

The show, which comes with a reported $10 million-per-episode price tag, was the second most popular SVOD program in the U.S. behind Netflix's mega-popular Red Notice for the week of Nov. 15-21. Red Notice has gone on to become Netflix's most popular English-language film ever in its first 28 days on platform.

The Wheel of Time, an adaptation of Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's eponymous early-1900s fantasy novel series,  is produced by Sony and Amazon Studios. 

The first eight-episode season wraps on Friday, Dec. 24.

Fantasy series The Wheel of Time, set in a world where magic exists, and only certain women can access it, premieres on Amazon Prime Nov. 19. Three episodes are available on premiere day, and new episodes turn up on Fridays.

Rosamund Pike plays Moiraine, a member of a powerful all-female organization called the Aes Sedai, who embarks on a world-spanning journey with five young men and women, one of whom is prophesied to be the Dragon Reborn, who will either save or destroy humanity.

Robert Jordan wrote the fantasy novels that inspired the series. Amazon said more than 90 million books in the franchise have been sold.

The Wheel of Time was adapted for television by executive producer/showrunner Rafe Judkins. Larry Mondragon and Rick Selvage of iwot productions, Mike Weber, Ted Field of Radar Pictures, Darren Lemke, Marigo Kehoe and Uta Briesewitz executive produce, with Briesewitz directing the first two episodes.

The Wheel of Time is co-produced by Amazon Studios and Sony Pictures Television. ■

The slowdown in Disney Plus subscriber growth has helped push the stock down by more than 7% over the past month, and two influential analysts said the entertainment giant will likely have to dig deep and spend more on content to get itself back on track. 

Shares in The Walt Disney Co. closed at $171.18 on Oct. 19, up 4 cents from the day before, but the stock has been on a downward slope since Sept. 17, when it closed at $183.47 per share, just before CEO Bob Chapek said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference that Disney Plus additions would be in the “low single-digit millions” in fiscal Q4, which ends Sept. 30. That marked a big fall off from previous quarters — it added 12.4 million in fiscal Q3 and 21.2 million in fiscal Q1 — and spooked investors who saw it as a sign that the subscriber growth train was grinding down.       

Disney Plus launched in November 2019 and quickly became the gold standard for streamers, signing on 10 million users in its first day and passing 100 million paid customers just 18 months into its existence. Analysts and Disney executives all cheered at the astounding success of the product, especially since Disney didn’t seem to be spending a whole lot on additional content to attract that audience. Two years after that much-ballyhooed launch, the Disney Plus juggernaut has started to hit the brakes, adding about 42.3 million global subscribers over the past three quarters, compared to 57.5 million additions in the same period in 2020. That led some analysts to rethink their outlook on Disney as the entertainment giant searches for ways to boost growth.

In fiscal Q4, MoffettNathanson media analyst Michael Nathanson estimates that Disney Plus will add about 2 million subscribers, its lowest total since its inception. 

In a research note Oct.18, Nathanson, citing independent research from HarrisX, wrote that one reason for the subscriber slowdown could be the service’s poor adoption rates with older viewers. Citing a HarrisX poll that asked consumers by age group which service — Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu or Disney Plus — they or someone in their household used to stream content, Disney Plus logged the lowest viewership with customers older than 55. It tallied just 18% of respondents, compared to 66% for Netflix and 56% for Amazon Prime Video. Hulu, which is controlled by Disney, was also on the low end when it comes to older viewers, with 26% of consumers over 55 years old saying that they use the service.

That is most likely due to the type of content available on the various services. Disney Plus caters to homes with small children, as well as Star Wars and Marvel fans. 

“We think that Disney needs to both invest in more original scripted general entertainment content at Hulu and Disney Plus while marketing Disney Plus in a bundle to older households,” Nathanson wrote.

Disney has held to its forecasts that it expects to have between 230 million and 260 million Disney Plus subscribers globally by 2024. But to reach that target, the company will have to add about 37.3 million new customers per year, a figure that Nathanson wrote could be difficult, but not impossible, to achieve. 

Nathanson predicted Disney Plus would have about 245 million global subscribers by the end of fiscal 2024. But a lot of that will depend on how successful the service is in attracting customers outside the U.S. To date, between 30% and 40% of Disney Plus’s annual subscriber growth has come from Disney‘s Hotstar Plus service in India. According to Nathanson’s estimates, Hotstar Plus will account for about 47% of total Disney Plus subscribers by 2024.

Some See Structural Issues

But though Nathanson is optimistic that Disney Plus will reach its targets, other analysts aren’t so sure. On Tuesday, Barclays Group media analyst Kannan Venkateshwar lowered his rating on Disney to “Equal Weight” from “Overweight,” adding in a research note that the slowdown in subscribers is happening even as Disney has launched new franchise titles and  day-and-date movie releases and Star Plus sports content in Europe and Latin America..

“Part of this slowdown could be a function of growth pull forward into 2020 and promo roll-offs, but we believe it could be due to structural factors capping growth,” Venkateshwar wrote. “In order to get to its long term streaming sub guide, Disney needs to more than double its current pace of growth to at least the same level as Netflix. We believe this may be tough to do.”

According to Venkateshwar, Disney Plus has been adding about 2.5 million domestic subscribers — not including Hotstar Plus — every quarter for the past three quarters. To reach the 230 million goal, he predicts Disney Plus would have to more than double that pace to around 7 million subscribers globally (not including Hotstar +) per quarter. 

The Barclays analyst pointed to Disney’s industry-low streaming content -- 1,343 titles compared to 7,972 titles for Amazon Prime. And though Disney has stepped up its game to release at least one piece of new content each week, it often isn’t compelling enough to attract new customers.   

“In our opinion, the problem Disney faces is that of low engagement, as there are barely enough shows to keep audiences interested in the service,” Venkateshwar wrote. “While the company appears to be targeting one new piece of content a week, not every piece of content has the same franchise value or visibility which means the releases that actually drive origination or engagement have a much lower frequency.”

Adding more content could help subscribers growth, but Venkateshwar notes that Disney’s content structure — currently focused on theatrical releases of franchise movies ± may make that harder.

“In a streaming-first world, the proliferation of content and streaming services means that continuous engagement needs significantly more volume of content,” Venkateshwar wrote. He added that serialized franchise content across theatrical and streaming platforms becomes a problem because the timing shift of one title creates a ripple effect on the release schedule of other titles across other platforms. 

A Changing Content Game

The content game also is changing, Venkateshwar wrote, as other players like Apple, Amazon and HBO spend as much or more on content as Disney. And Netflix added another wrinkle with its entrance into video games and local production facilities — which Disney does not have — around the globe.  

“This is why it is likely to get tougher for Disney Plus to get both price and volume,” he wrote.

In his note, Venkateshwar noted that even Hotstar‘s growth could be impacted, because it relies heavily on the rights to televised cricket matches, which reset next year. 

“Recent M&A in the market may result in either more pressure on rights costs or a loss of these rights,” Venkateshwar wrote, adding that he expects Disney Plus to end 2024 with about 200 million subscribers.  

Amazon Studios has ordered a second season of Good Omens. Michael Sheen and David Tennant will reprise their roles as angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley, the mismatched duo that saves the world from the apocalypse. 

Filming starts in Scotland later this year. No premiere date was revealed for the Amazon Prime series. 

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett teamed up on the 1990 novel that the series is based on. Pratchett died in 2015. 

The new season “will explore storylines that go beyond the original source material to illuminate the uncanny friendship between Aziraphale, a fussy angel and rare book dealer, and the fast-living demon Crowley,” said Amazon. “Having been on Earth since The Beginning and with the Apocalypse thwarted, Aziraphale and Crowley are getting back to easy living amongst mortals in London’s Soho when an unexpected messenger presents a surprising mystery.”

Gaiman executive produces and runs the show along with Douglas Mackinnon, who will direct. Rob Wilkins, John Finnemore and BBC Studios Productions’ Head of Comedy Josh Cole will also executive produce. 

“It’s 31 years since Good Omens was published, which means it's thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel,” said Gaiman, who has an overall deal with Amazon Studios. “I got to use bits of the sequel in Good Omens -- that's where our angels came from. Terry's not here any longer, but when he was, we had talked about what we wanted to do with Good Omens, and where the story went next. And now, thanks to BBC Studios and Amazon, I get to take it there.”

Season one premiered in 2019. Season two is produced by Amazon Studios, BBC Studios Productions, The Blank Corporation and Narrativia.

“Taking Good Omens to my home country of Scotland to film a second season is an exciting dream come true for me,” said Mackinnon. “And with Michael Sheen and David Tennant returning as Aziraphale and Crowley, we really have an angel and a demon on our side.”

Despite a falloff in overall subscribers in Q1, virtual MVPD services will bounce back and likely become the gateway for TV services for most consumers, fuboTV founder and CEO David Gandler said at an industry conference Thursday, adding that he sees the day when  customers, tired of continued price increases at the growing number of SVOD services, will turn to aggregators like his company for their entertainment and sports content.

Virtual MVPDs lost about 240,000 subscribers in Q1, according to MoffettNathanson, compared to a loss of about 374,000 customers in the prior year, as gains at fuboTV (about 43,000) and YouTube TV weren’t enough to offset losses at other providers. Still, while some pundits said the losses were a sign that the vMVPD space was headed for more declines, MoffettNathanson said the falloff was an indication of the growing seasonality of the business. 

Gandler, speaking at S&P Global Market Intelligence's virtual Kagan Media Summit on Thursday, agreed, adding that consumers that cut the traditional pay TV cord usually take a few months before signing up with a new service.

“Q1 saw several services that didn’t grow, but we saw that in the last Q1,” Gandler said. “What happens is someone cancels cable or satellite in Q1 and they wait until Q3 to sign up, either because they’re  getting a new apartment, or it’s the NFL season. That has been, even for traditional cable, a historical time for signups.”

Gandler said that most consumers want more content, not less, and that in the end, they will likely turn to aggregators like FuboTV for entertainment, news and sports programming.

“I do believe vMVPDs will become the gateways of television when the street starts to push back on the cost associated with these SVOD services,” Gandler said, later estimating that there could be as many as 50 million subscribers in the vMVPD ecosystem in eight-to-10 years, “and SVOD services will look for ways to be part of those bundles.” 

Gandler believes that despite some pretty hefty increases in the monthly charges for some MVPDs over the years, including his own. In the end, the success of any content service hinges on the value it delivers to the customer.  

“We were a $6.99 service per month back in 2015, increased prices 10 times and still managed to improve all of our KPIs,” Gandler said. “I believe that’s because we are able to provide that value proposition.”

He added that in Q1, the average fuboTV viewer watched 129 hours of content per month, more than twice the 50 hours the average Netflix customer watched that service. 

And though fuboTV is sports focused, it offers general entertainment and new channels in its offerings too. That, he said, is key in attracting and retaining subscribers. 

“We say, ‘Come for the sports, stay for the entertainment. Sports drives acquisitions, it does not drive retention,” Gandler said, adding that Q1 was fubo’s eighth straight quarter of churn reduction.

And that is happening even as vMVPDs have raised prices. 

“The average customer, despite the fact that our product is now $65, is spending about 50 cents per hour,” Gandler said. “It packs a lot of punch for 50 cents per hour. Which [leads] me to believe that the proliferation of SVOD is only going to drive more customers to the virtual MVPD.”

Gandler said that most cord cutters are already paying around $60 per month for the SVOD services they subscribe to, like Netflix ($13.99), Amazon Prime Video ($12.99), Disney Plus ($7.99), HBO Max ($14.99), Hulu ($5.99 w/ads; $11.99 w/o ads) and Paramount Plus ($4.99 w/ads, $9.99 w/o ads).

“We know that media companies will eventually have to raise prices,” Gandler said. “Why? Because sports rights continue  to cost more -- we saw that with the NFL deal that was up 100% -- we’ve seen that with more competition with respect to entertainment content with Apple and Amazon and others getting in to acquire series. Everyone is generally going to be paying more. Prices for those SVOD services right now are low because they want to get as many people in the door as possible, but ultimately prices will go up.”    

Netflix has averaged a price increase about every two years, and in October upped the price of its standard package by $1 per month to $13.99.  Disney Plus increased its monthly charges from $6.99 to $7.99 in March, and others are sure to follow. As the rising cost of content continues to put pressure on streaming services, Gandler said that something will eventually have to give. 

“I believe that consumers are going to start reaching SVOD fatigue at some point,” Gandler said. “$65, $70 or $80 is not really a lot of money, given that people are watching seven days a week.”

Amazon said it will air a set of three shows featuring music stars to commemorate and promote Prime Day, when the online shopping giant boosts traffic by offering bargain prices.

The Prime Day Show segments will feature Billie Eilish, H.E.R. and Kid Cudi. The show will be available starting June 17 on Prime Video for 30 days to all viewers whether or not they’re Prime members.

Amazon's Prime Day runs June 21 and 22.

“Working with Billie Eilish, H.E.R., and Kid Cudi to bring their music to life through these imaginative experiences has been incredible,” said Ryan Redington, VP of music industry at Amazon Music. “Watching these globally renowned artists create three shows from the depths of their imagination has been unlike anything we’ve ever done before. We’re thrilled to bring fans along with us to celebrate these three remarkable artists and Prime Day.” 

Also Read: Amazon Just Paid a 40% Premium to Buy MGM — What’s It Really Getting?

Each segment runs about 25 minutes.

Eilish’s segment is set in Paris and features new music from her upcoming album Happier Than Ever. 

Eilish will also be launching a line of merch that will drop exclusively on Amazon on June 17. People can buy the t-shirts, sweats, posters and other items at Amazon.com/BillieEilish or the Amazon Music app. 

H.E.R.'s segment is set at what the Dunbar Hotel would be like if it still existed today. Back in the 30s and 40s, musicians including Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and Billie Holiday were there. 

Also Read: Should Amazon Even Be Allowed to Gobble up MGM?

Kid Cudi’s segment features music from his album Man on the Moon III. It features the International Space Orchestra, composed of scientists from NASA Ames Research Center, the SETI Institute and the International Space University.

The Prime Day Show X Billie Eilish is produced by Fremantle and Amazon Studios and is directed by Billie Eilish and Sam Wrench. Ashley Edens served as executive producer and Sam Wrench as co-executive producer. 

SynopsisAmazon said it will air a set of three shows featuring music stars to commemorate and promote Prime Day, when the online shopping giant boosts traffic by offering bargain prices.ime Day Show X H.E.R. is produced by Fremantle, Wolf + Rothstein and Amazon Studios and is directed by child. Ashley Edens served as executive producer, along with Chad Taylor, Fam Rothstein and Sam Wrench as co-executive producers. 

The Prime Day Show X Kid Cudi is produced by Fremantle, Wolf + Rothstein, MAD SOLAR and Amazon Studios and is directed by Sam Wrench. Ashley Edens served as executive producer, along with Chad Taylor, Fam Rothstein and Sam Wrench as co-executive producers. 

Amazon Prime will stream a new music documentary featuring R&B superstar Mary J. Blige on June 25, the streaming service said. 

Mary J. Blige’s My Life, traces the singer’s inspiration in creating her signature 1994 album My Life, which propelled her from the soul-crushing world of New York’s housing projects to international stardom, according to Amazon. As part of the documentary, Blige will perform the album live for the first time, said the service.

Mary J. Blige’s My Life is executive produced by Blige, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, Tara Long, Mark Ford, Kevin Lopez, Jeffrey Harleston and Jody Gerson.

Amazon Prime has released the first video trailer for its new sci-fi series Solos, which debuts on the streaming service May 21.

The series follows seven characters who are seemingly alone but realize that even during their most isolated moments, they are all connected through the human experience, said network officials. 

Solos stars Uzo Aduba, Nicole Beharie, Morgan Freeman, Anthony Mackie and Anne Hathaway. 

Read also: 'Thursday Night Football' to Amazon in 2022

NFL Thursday Night Football will be moving exclusively to streaming on Amazon Prime Video starting with the 2022 season, a year earlier than originally planned, the league announced.

The 2021 season will be the last year of Thursday Night Football on Fox. It has been the second-most watched in prime time.

The NFL had announced new rights deals with its media partners worth $100 billion two months ago. Fox will continue its Sunday afternoon game package, including America’s Game of the Week, the most watched show on television for the past 12 seasons.

Giving Amazon the Thursday Night Football package exclusively is a big jump for streaming.

Thursday night games will still be available in the competing teams’ home markets via over-the -air television.

Several streaming services could experience a nice Oscars-related bump in streams and subscribers sign ups -- to go along with an increase in industry prestige -- given the platform's strong performance during last night's Academy Awards ceremony.

The biggest winner during ABC's live Oscars broadcast Sunday was Netflix, who took home an industry leading seven Academy Award statuettes for five different projects, including two for its drama films Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Mank. 

While Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom star Chadwick Boseman did not posthumously take home the best actor award as he did within the category at the Critics Choice, Golden Globes, and Screen Actors Guild awards -- he was upset by 83-year old Anthony Hopkins’ performance in The Father --  the film did win best makeup and hairstyling as well as best costume design. The film, produced by Denzel Washington, stars Academy Award nominated Viola Davis in the role of 1920’s blues singer Ma Rainey and follows the exploits of a 1927 recording session in Chicago. 

Oscars 2021: Photos From the 93rd Academy Awards

Netflix’s Mank, which chronicles the making of the 1941 Citizen Kane film, also took home two statuettes for production design and best cinematography. Netflix’s documentary My Octopus Teacher won for best documentary feature, while short films Two Distant Strangers and If Anything Happens I Love You won for the best live action and best animated short categories respectively. 

Netflix's Oscars showing is good news for the streamer, which last week reported an anemic, pandemic-addled first quarter performance in which it tallied a lower than expected 4 million new subscribers.

Also Read: Netflix adds Just 4 Million New Subscribers in 1st Quarter

Other services like Hulu should benefit from having the streaming rights to this year’s best picture, Nomadland. The movie, which premiered on Hulu in February, also won the best actress award for star Frances McDormand and best director for Chloe Zhao. Zhao becomes the first woman of color to win the award, and only the second woman behind The Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow.

Amazon Prime is currently the home for two-time Academy Award winning film the Sound of Metal, which won the Oscar for best sound and best film editing. The movie, which follows Oscar-nominated star Riz Ahmed as a rock band drummer who begins to lose his hearing, was also nominated for best picture.

Disney, which finished second to Netflix with five Oscars wins, should generate increased interest for its Disney Plus streaming service through its owned studio Pixar’s animated film Soul. The movie, which stars Jamie Foxx as a black musician whose soul hovers between Earth and the afterlife, won Oscars for best animated film and best score. Disney Plus debuted Soul this past Christmas and it currently streams on the service. 

Also Read: Disney Plus' 'Soul' Ranked No. 1 for Christmas Week Streaming, Nielsen Says

Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney stormed this year's Academy Awards with a slate of prestigious, well-reviewed films that had already secured the streaming platform's position among the most successful and prolific producers and distributors of Hollywood films before the first envelope was opened during last night’s ceremony. Now, with a truckload of Oscars and streaming rights to many of last night's biggest winners in tow, streamers are sitting pretty among the major power brokers in the film world.

Amazon said it spent $11 billion last year on video and music content for its Amazon Prime services, an increase of 41% over 2019.

The disclosure was made Thursday in an annual report, which also highlighted the company’s surpassing of 200 million prime members worldwide. Amazon said it grew its Prime base by 50 million members in the pandemic year of 2020. 

Amazon didn’t say how many of those members regularly tap into Prime Video, either domestically or on a global basis, or how many Prime members live in the U.S.

The $11 billion figure accounts for what Amazon Studios spends making original TV shows and movies, as well as licensing content for Prime. In addition, the figure includes money spent on maintaining transactional services that rent and sell video and music content. 

According to data supplied by BMO Capital Markets, Netflix spent $17.3 billion on content in 2020—a figure that’s a bit apples-and-oranges when compared to Amazon, which runs a very different business, but one that does have some merit, nonetheless. 

Amazon’s total revenue increased by 38% to an all-time high of $386.1 billion in 2020. Net income for the year was $21.3 billion, nearly doubling the $11.6 million made in 2019. 

Terror anthology Them premieres on Amazon Prime April 9. Little Marvin created the series and Lena Waithe executive produces. 

The show “explores terror in America,” according to Amazon. The season is set in the 1950s and looks at a Black family that moves from North Carolina to a white neighborhood in Los Angeles. “The family’s idyllic home becomes ground zero where malevolent forces, next-door and otherworldly, threaten to taunt, ravage and destroy them,” according to Amazon. 

Deborah Ayorinde, Ashley Thomas, Alison Pill, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Melody Hurd and Ryan Kwanten are in the cast. (Review by R. Thomas Umstead.)

Them is created and executive produced by Little Marvin along with executive producers Lena Waithe, Miri Yoon and Roy Lee of Vertigo Entertainment, David Matthews and Don Kurt. Them is a co-production from Sony Pictures Television and Amazon Studios.

Waithe created The Chi, which premieres season four on Showtime May 23. 

Amazon’s biggest and best-known video-streaming unit is Amazon Prime Video, which is roughly as old as the streaming version of Netflix. Amazon Prime Video actually launched back in 2006 as Amazon Unbox. Since then, Amazon Prime has undergone a string of makeovers worthy of a Hollywood starlet, including multiple name changes, technological shifts, and the 2011 acquisition of Love Film, a British service similar to Netflix. 

And, like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video is now available in roughly 200 countries, with the main exceptions being mainland China, North Korea, Iran and Syria. 

Also Read: Amazon Infiltrates Fire TV into Cable TV Market with NCTC Deal

Amazon Prime, a program that involves free shipping on select goods, has an estimated 126 million members, who also get access to Amazon Prime Video as part of their $119/year fee, though third-party research suggests only about half of those customers take advantage. Amazon Prime Video is also available a la carte, at $8.99 per month, or only 93 cents less than the pro-rated cost of the much broader Prime subscription. 

Amazon spends an estimated $6 billion a year in programming, largely through Amazon Studios, presided over by former NBC entertainment chief Jennifer Salke for the past two years. 

The studios have been productive under Salke, particularly in comedy, where The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Fleabag took turns the past two years winning the Emmy for Best Comedy Series, among many other awards.

Amazon also has invested heavily, both in production and marketing, in other originals, most notably for a spinoff series based on Lord of the Rings. For those rights, secured amid peak interest in HBO’s Game of Thrones, Amazon paid $250 million, and is spending a similar amount to produce the initial series episodes. 

Amazon Prime Video’s newest big bet is Hunters, a revisionist historical take on Nazi hunters in the United States in the 1970s. It stars Al Pacino and Logan Lerman, and has been heavily promoted during the 2020 Oscars telecast and many other places. Other recent high-profile Amazon Prime Video programs include anthology show Modern Love, inspired by the New York Times column; Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan featuring  John Krasinski; and British sci-fi adaptation The Feed, featuring David Thewlis. There’s also plenty of licensed content to fill out around the originals. 

The Sun Never Sets

But Amazon’s streaming-media reach hardly stops with Amazon Prime Video. 

Amazon Channels is an Amazon Prime Video add-on, giving customers easy subscription access to still more TV, from roughly 150 providers, including such traditional pay-TV powers as HBO,  Showtime, and Starz; basic-cable spinoffs such as BET+, Lifetime Movie Club, Noggin, and Hallmark; newer streamers such as CBS All Access, BritBox, and CuriosityStream; and specialty channels such as Upfaith & Family, and Yoga Anytime Channel. 

Amazon Channels has been a lucrative outlet, for both the networks and Amazon itself. In late 2018, BMO Capital Markets estimated that the Channels unit generated $1.7 billion that year, as much as 30 percent going to Amazon. More importantly, Amazon Channels was generating anywhere from 25% to 40% of the subscribers watching those participating networks, BMO estimated.    

But not everyone wants to build their own replacement cable bundle. For the audience segment that prefers their video content free and don’t mind ads, in early 2019, Amazon launched AVOD service Freedive, with content licensed from Warner Bros., Sony, and MGM, interspersed with ads. Less than six months later, Freedive rebranded to IMDb TV, which competes most closely with the Roku Channel and reinforces another big Amazon brand. 

Also Read: The Five Spot: Q&A with Mark Eamer, VP of IMDb TV

Amazon still has its transactional side, too, selling traditional DVDs, Blu-Ray discs and CDs for the antediluvian audiences who still like old-fashioned packaged media. Its e-commerce operations are also a major Electronic Sell-Through and rental outlet.

It’s also worth noting that Amazon’s online-media offerings extend well beyond video. 

There’s Twitch, the live streaming platform focused on live multiplayer videogaming, that Amazon purchased in 2014. Twitch’s technological knowhow might come in handy as Amazon gets into things like live sports broadcast licensing. In June, Amazon started staffing up its software engineering and product management ranks to begin offering live, linear streaming. 

The Amazon Prime empire also includes IMDb, the vast reference database of film, TV shows, and other media content.  Amazon Music provides subscription music streams on par with Spotify and Apple. Amazon Prime members get a subset of that music for free. And the company owns audible.com, the giant purveyor of audiobooks and premium podcasts.

These disparate Amazon Prime offerings don’t seem to fit together particularly well. In part, as one former Amazon executive told me recently, the company frequently experiments with formats and approaches in new sectors.

“They tend to do a lot of experiments and learn from them,” the executive said. “Even if they lose money, it’s okay. They then grow from the knowledge.”

Amazon Prime has already killed off some experiments, like Anime Strike, an anime-focused stand-alone network on Amazon Channels that required its own separate subscription. 

Anime Strike launched in 2017 and lasted barely a year before shutting down, its content now available partly on Prime Video and partly on indie anime service HIDIVE.

But one part of the Amazon Prime empire does knit together all its disparate media experiments: its burgeoning hardware offerings. They include Fire TV tablets, connected TV interfaces, streaming devices, and a proliferating universe of first- and third-party devices built around the Alexa digital assistant. 

With more than 40 million active users worldwide, Amazon Fire TV is the No. 1 OTT device ecosystem globally. It ranks only behind Roku in the U.S. 

To borrow a well-used phrase from another famous brand, the range of Amazon media offerings allows customers to have it their way, on any of hundreds of devices and through just about every business model out there. Amazon Prime’s vast reach and resources allow it to be everywhere, and to try everything., to see what works  for consumers. 

As with some other massive players in the online space (Apple, Disney, increasingly Comcast), Amazon Prime’s media offerings are a way to make money, sure, but more importantly, they’re a way to keep customers coming back for everything else the company has to offer. Don’t call their media ventures a loss leader; call them a profit pusher. 

Seasons one and two of comedy Loudermilk premiere on Amazon Prime March 12. Amazon Prime has also acquired season three. 

The first two seasons ran on AT&T’s Audience Network, which was shuttered last year. It had ordered a third season for the show, which was set to run in 2019 but never did. 

Peter Farrelly and Bobby Mort created Loudermilk. The show centers on Sam Loudermilk, a former music critic and alcoholic in Seattle who is a substance abuse counselor with a bad attitude.

Ron Livingston plays Loudermilk. 

Amazon has not shared when season three will premiere. 

After a relapse in New Orleans and a falling out with his best friend and sponsor, Loudermilk is back in Seattle, trying to piece his world back together. With his “Sober Friends” meeting hijacked, a messy new relationship, and a stumbling start back into writing, Loudermilk does a bit of soul searching in the new season.

Will Sasso, Anja Savcic, Timothy Webber, Brian Regan and Jackie Flynn are also in the cast. Sony Pictures Television produces Loudermilk. 

Farrelly’s films include There’s Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber and Green Book, the latter getting the Academy Award for best picture in 2018. Farrelly told B+C he had “zero interest in television” when he first arrived in Los Angeles in the ’80s. “TV is where it’s at,” he said back in 2017. “It’s a better place to be. You can do more in TV than you can do in movies.”

Seasons one and two of Loudermilk have 10 episodes apiece. 

Coming 2 America, the sequel to the hit 1988 comedy film, arrives on Amazon Prime March 5. Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall star, and Craig Brewer directs. 

John Landis directed Coming to America, which saw Akeem Joffer (played by Murphy), prince of the nation of Zamunda, travel to the United States with his friend Semmi (Hall) to find a wife. They settle in Queens, New York.

The sequel has Akeem, now a king, and Semmi embark on a new adventure that has them traversing the globe from their African home to Queens once again. 

Paramount Pictures produced the movie, partly shot at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. 

James Earl Jones, Shari Headley, John Amos and Louie Anderson reprise their roles from the original movie. Wesley Snipes, Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, Jermaine Fowler and Bella Murphy join them in the cast. 

The month of February rolls along with several returning series hitting airwaves this week. 

OWN on Feb. 16 will debut season five of its Ava DuVernay-produced drama series Queen Sugar, while Freeform on Feb. 17 will bring back its drama series Good Trouble for its third campaign. 

Also premiering this week is Hulu’s highly-touted movie Nomadland, which stars Frances McDormand as a woman who leaves her small town to travel the country. The film debuts on Hulu and in theaters on Feb. 19.

Below are video trailers and premiere dates for several shows debuting the week of Feb.16 to Feb. 21) on cable networks and streaming services (for some videos, viewer discretion is advised):

Feb. 16 -- Temptation Island (reality) -- USA

Feb. 17 -- Amend: The Fight for America (documentary) -- Netflix

Feb. 18 -- The March on Washington: Keepers of the Dream (documentary) -- National Geographic

Feb. 18 -- It’s a Sin (drama) -- HBO Max

Feb. 19 -- I Care a Lot (movie) -- Netflix

Feb. 19 -- For All Mankind (returning series) -- Apple TV+

Feb. 19 -- Tell Me Your Secrets (drama) -- Prime Video

Feb. 21 -- Supervillian: The Making of Tekashl 61x9lne (music) -- Showtime

Feb. 21-- Allen v. Farrow (miniseries) -- HBO

Adult animation series Invincible, from The Walking Dead mastermind Robert Kirkman, starts on Amazon Prime March 26. Steven Yeun plays Mark Grayson (a.k.a. Invincible) and J.K. Simmons plays Nolan Grayson (a.k.a. Omni-Man). 

The first three episodes will be available March 26, with new episodes turning up each Friday, and the season finale April 30. 

Based on the Skybound/Image comic by Kirkman, Invincible is a superhero show that revolves around 17-year-old Mark, who is just like every other guy his age — except that his father is the most powerful superhero on the planet, Omni-Man. But as Mark develops powers of his own, he discovers that his father’s legacy may not be as heroic as it seems.

Sandra Oh, Seth Rogen, Gillian Jacobs, Andrew Rannels, Zazie Beetz, Mark Hamill and Walton Goggins are also in the cast. 

Invincible is produced by Skybound and executive produced by Kirkman, Simon Racioppa, David Alpert and Catherine Winder. The comic-book series concluded in 2018 after a 15-year run.

Dramedy Flack, about a publicist cleaning up for a messy celeb client, premieres on Amazon Prime Jan. 22. Six-episode season one is available to stream, with season two on Prime later this year. 

“Bad Behavior. Great Publicists. Ever wonder what the real story is behind those celebrity gossip columns?” goes the Amazon description of the show. “Flack has all the dirt. Four quick-witted and relentless flackers led by Robyn, played by Academy Award winner Anna Paquin, are tasked to make the best of their celebrity client’s terrible decisions. Will their ability to clean up their client’s lives translate to their own?”

Brad Beale, VP of worldwide content licensing, Amazon Prime Video, called Amazon Prime a natural fit for Flack. “When we first watched Flack, we were very excited about giving this show a second chance, as we believe our customers will gravitate to and appreciate this unique dark comedy,” he told B+C.

Oliver Lansley created Flack, which also airs on the W network in the UK.

Season one aired on Pop TV, which ordered a second season but never aired it as its programming strategy shifted. 

“Amazon has this obviously massive reach,” Paquin told B+C. “We have a whole first season a lot of people have not seen, and an entire second season literally ready to go.”

Lydia Wilson and Sophie Okonedo are also in the cast. 

Like many well-received shows during the pandemic, Flack, with Anna Paquin as a PR doyenne tasked with cleaning up the messes of high-profile clients, was dropped by its network, Pop TV. Season two was in the can, but as Pop TV changed its programming strategy in the wake of the merger of parent ViacomCBS, the series was canceled.

Unlike most orphaned series, Flack, offering a heady mix of drama and comedy, has found a new home. Season one, with six episodes, starts Jan. 22 on Amazon Prime Video and season two will stream later this year.

Creator Oliver Lansley mentioned an overwhelming sense of gratification when Amazon Prime got on board with Flack. “More than anything, it was relief,” he said from England. “The idea of spending a year making a series, and the whole thing not being seen by anyone, is devastating.”

Also Read: New ‘Flack’ Home Suits Star Paquin

One Network at a Time

Shows that have found new networks after cancellation, including One Day at a Time, The Expanse and Lucifer, have been a mixed bag, some getting a number of additional seasons at their new homes, others getting just one. Landing on a second network hardly ensures a series will suddenly become a smash, but at least it offers that opportunity. “You should always be excited that you have another chance,” said Neal Baer, who was showrunner on Designated Survivor after it shifted to Netflix following the political drama’s cancellation by ABC. “If you have a chance again, you’re way beyond where other shows are when they get canceled. Embrace it.”

Designated Survivor with Kiefer Sutherland got one season on Netflix in 2019 before it was canceled again. Mindy Kaling comedy The Mindy Project had three seasons on Hulu after its first three seasons on Fox. Sci-fi drama The Expanse did three seasons on Syfy before shifting to Amazon Prime Video in 2019. Season five is streaming now, and Amazon ordered a sixth and final season. Cop comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine had five seasons on Fox before getting picked up on NBC in 2019. 

While Netflix is often the network that rescues orphaned series, it canceled comedy One Day at a Time after three seasons in 2019, with the show then doing one more season at Pop TV.

Busted Pilot: ‘Flack’ Finds a Home, ‘The Flight Attendant’ Flies High, ‘All American’ Back to School

Other series that have found new networks after cancellation include Longmire, Tuca & Bertie, Last Man Standing, Mr. Mercedes and You. Cobra Kai, for one, got off to a strong start at Netflix this month after two seasons on YouTube. “No one cared about it on YouTube, and everyone’s talking about it on Netflix,” said Old Dominion University assistant professor of communications Myles McNutt. 

Amazon Prime has not committed to new seasons of Flack, but will stream the two seasons produced while at Pop TV. “As with any of these decisions, we’ll be looking to our customers to guide our decision here,” said Brad Beale, VP of worldwide content licensing, Amazon Prime Video, “and we’re optimistic we can bring in existing fans of the series and build a new audience for it.” 

‘Prime’ Time

Flack’s search for a new home was relatively smooth, according to Lansley, who described Amazon Prime as “our first port of call” after the show’s cancellation. 

Beale said Flack fits right in with other Amazon originals. “When we first watched Flack, we were very excited about giving this show a second chance, as we believe our customers will gravitate to and appreciate this unique dark comedy,” he said. “We look at Flack as an excellent complement to our existing slate of curated series and expect it to be highly bingeable, given the performances of the amazing cast and timeliness of the themes. It touches on the complexities of modern life, where problems can go viral an instant.”

With COVID causing all sorts of production headaches, including significant budgetary dings, having a season in the can available for acquisition is more enticing to a number of networks than starting series production from day one. And the pandemic has pushed streaming to the television norm among viewers, making the major digital platforms such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu a more-desired destination for many producers. “If you’re not playing in that arena, it’s a lot harder for your things to get seen,” Paquin said. 

Airing on a streaming platform also gives the producers more creative leeway than they typically find on broadcast and basic cable. For Neal Baer, it meant bolder stories on Designated Survivor than the show had done on ABC. 

“We got to tell very controversial, socially relevant stories,” he said. “There was no holding back on content. There’s a freedom on streaming that is really compelling for a lot of writers.”

Broadcast networks answer to advertisers and the FCC. “They don’t love controversy,” added Baer. 

Streaming also allows for a deeper dive into a complicated character, such as Paquin’s PR ace Robyn. “There’s much more appetite for more complex and deeper emotional and psychological portrayal of a character,” said Linda Ong, co-founder and CEO of cultural consultancy Cultique, “as opposed to it being more plot-driven.”

Amazon vs. Netflix

Amazon Prime Video does not have the same robust brand for original content that Netflix does, say some cultural pundits. A Nielsen study of the top 10 streaming original series in 2020 had nine Netflix shows and one from Disney Plus. McNutt said Netflix does an effective job of “naturalizing” a series — taking a show it has either picked up after cancellation or one that is licensed from another network, and getting viewers to think of it as native to Netflix. How many young viewers of Friends or Schitt’s Creek, for example, think of them as Netflix originals?

“The rebrand that Netflix does, Amazon cannot do,” McNutt said. “Amazon has never had that brand identity. Netflix can rebrand a show and no other network has successfully accomplished that.”

The Netflix brand is all about watching television, said Ong, while Amazon is about buying books, toilet paper and antacid, and watching television. Still, “don’t underestimate the ability of Amazon Prime to bring in an audience,” she said. 

In a 500-scripted-show universe, having a popular streaming platform “curate” an off-the-radar program, in Ong’s words, can give the series a serious boost. “It’s a seal of approval in a sea of content,” she said. “Consumers think, if it’s on Netflix, it must be good.”

She added, “The Amazon brand has less cachet, but it still does have cachet.”

‘Flack’ Attack

Season two of Flack has aired in the U.K. on the network W, and Paquin said it was “well received.” The second season’s edgy appeal may get a similar reaction in the U.S. “I do think that people are sick of the BS,” Paquin said. “Seeing the dark underbelly as opposed to the smoke and mirrors might appeal to people even more.”

Ong believes Flack has a decent chance of breaking out on its new network. “With the right marketing and the right algorithm, if the content is good and unique and differentiated, I think there’s huge potential,” she said. 

With Amazon Prime’s history of biting comedies featuring strong female leads such as Fleabag and Catastrophe, Oliver Lansley said it feels like the proper place for Flack. “We feel like we’ve found our spiritual home,” he said. “We hope it fits well with its compatriots.”

Amazon Prime will stream the final 10 episodes of drama Vikings starting Dec. 30. The series has thus far premiered on History, and streamed on Amazon. The first 10 episodes of the series’ final season, Michael Hirst’s family saga showcasing the adventures of Nordic raiders and explorers in the Dark Ages, aired earlier this year. 

“Prime Video has already delighted Prime members with all five and a half seasons of Vikings,” said Brad Beale, VP of worldwide content licensing for Prime Video. “On Dec. 30, Prime members in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Austria and Ireland will be the first to learn the fates of the beloved characters as the epic drama concludes in the final ten episodes.”

History, which has shifted its scripted original focus to limited series, will air the final ten episodes in 2021. 

The first part of the sixth and final season concluded with an epic battle between the Rus and Vikings where brother fought brother, Bjorn Ironside (Alexander Ludwig) fighting for his homeland alongside King Harald (Peter Franzen) against Ivar the Boneless (Alex Høgh Andersen) now fighting with the Rus forces in an attempt to gain control of Norway. The battle ends in tragedy. 

“Our monumental Vikings saga is coming to its conclusion, but not before you’ve had a chance to watch some of my all-time favorite episodes,” said creator and executive producer Hirst. “Prime Video will uniquely expose the series finale to a streaming audience first. Prepare to be astonished, and for many surprises along the way. And if you have tears to shed, then also be prepared to shed them.”

The other executive producers are Morgan O’Sullivan of TM Productions, Sheila Hockin, John Weber of Take 5 Productions, Sherry Marsh, Alan Gasmer and James Flynn. 

Vikings is an Irish/Canadian co-production by TM Productions and Take 5 Productions, in association with Corus Entertainment. MGM Television distributes the show outside of Ireland and Canada. 

The Pack, a competition series hosted by Lindsey Vonn and her dog Lucy, starts on Amazon Prime Nov. 20. The show features 12 teams of humans and dogs “on an epic adventure across multiple continents,” according to Amazon Prime. 

There are 10 episodes. 

The winning team gets $750,000, with $500,000 for them and the rest for the animal charity of their choice. Amazon said the teams will have to depend on their understanding of one another’s strengths and weaknesses and prove their strong bond. 

Vonn has won four World Cup overall skiing championships. She also won a gold medal at the 2010 Winter Olympics. 

Lucy is a Cavalier King Charles spaniel.  

The other dogs on the show include an Old Bluetick Coonhound, a Wire Haired Rat Terrier and a Schnoodle (Schnauzer-Poodle).

The Pack is produced by Amazon Studios and Renegade 83, an Entertainment One company. Jay Bienstock with Jay Renfroe and David Garfinkle of Renegade 83 are executive producers. 

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, a movie/film starring Sacha Baron Cohen as the clueless Kazakhstani TV personality, premieres on Amazon Prime Oct. 23. “Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime For Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” goes the tagline.  

Cohen played Borat in 2006 movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of American For Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Borat examines the pandemic and the elections in America in the new movie. It is making waves for a part that sees President Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, laying on a bed in a hotel room while chatting with an actress playing Borat’s daughter following their interview. 

Cohen previously starred in Who is America? on Showtime, which explored "the diverse individuals, from the infamous to the unknown across the political and cultural spectrum, who populate our unique nation."

Comcast’s Peacock added more new subscribers than any other streaming VOD services during the third quarter, according to Kantar.

Kantar also found that more consumers who added one service were cancelling another. Kantar called this subscription switching, and said 10% of new subscriptions were the result of switching, up from 9% in the second quarter.

“Q3 saw the full launch of NBC’s offering Peacock and it has strutted straight to #1 spot in share of new VOD subs. Peacock hit the market with a number of compelling price options, including offering Peacock Premium at no extra cost to certain Xfinity customer plans,” said Dominic Sunnebo, senior VP of Kantar, Worldpanel Division.

"Value for money" was the top individual subscription driver for Peacock, followed by the "variety of TV series," alongside "specific content", which was cited by 25% of new subscribers as their primary motivator for joining.

In late September, toward the end of the quarter, NBCU obtained Peacock distribution via Roku, adding an important source of customer signups.

Peacock garnered 17.2% of new subscribers during the third quarter, up from 4.9% in the second quarter. Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, Kantar said that 15% of households surveyed said they were considering signing up for Peacock.

When subscribers mentioned content that motivated them to sign up for Peacock, they mentioned Psych and Yellowstone most often.

Amazon Prime, which had been tops in the second quarter with 23.2% of new subscriptions, was No. 2 during the third quarter with 16%. Prime’s The Boys season two was the top title enjoyed across subscribers to all SVOD services in the quarter. Its ease of use satisfaction score increased to nearly equal Netflix’s.

AT&T’s HBO Max, which launched earlier this year, was third in the quarter with 11.3% of new subscribers, up from 9.7% in the second quarter.

The Walt Disney Co.’s Hulu was fourth with 9.5%, followed by Disney Plus with 9.1%, Netflix with 8.3% and Apple TV Plus with 4.9%.

Kantar noted that Hulu did well with cord cutters. Only 45% of its subscribers also subscribe to cable TV, compared to the SVOD market average of 53%. Hulu also got a boost by being available in bundles with Disney’s Disney Plus and ESPN Plus, and through partnership with Verizon.

Netflix dominated the list of most-enjoyed content over the quarter with Lucifer, Ozark and The Umbrella Academy all making it into the top five titles in Q3 2020. Despite share of new subscribers falling to 8.3%, Netflix churn rate remained low at just 4.1% quarter on quarter, meaning overall subscriber numbers were essentially flat.

AppleTV Plus' share of new SVOD subscribers fell in the quarter to 4.9%, though overall subscriber numbers continue to edge up. Consumers rate the TV interface very highly, but overall advocacy levels are brought down by more negative views on the number of new release films and number of classic films, Kantar said. Planned cancellation for Apple TV Plus is higher than the industry average and among those who plan to cancel, 26% state they are not prepared to pay once their free trial is over.

Kantar's Entertainment on Demand survey is based on a longitudinal panel of 20,000 consumers and boosted by 2,500 new subscriber interviews each quarter.

End-of-the-World Fun on Amazon 

Utopia is on Amazon Prime. A group of young people come together when they discover that the conspiracy in a comic that foretells the demise of humanity is, in fact, real. 

That demise-of-humanity thing might feel a bit timely. “The show does feature a panic-inducing viral outbreak,” executive producer Jessica Rhoades said. “But it’s more about how different groups of people band together to save the world.”

The show is inspired by a U.K. series of the same name that ran 2013-2014. Exec producer Gillian Flynn added Dr. Christie, played by John Cusack, to the U.S. series. “I think viewers will see a John that they haven’t seen before,” said Rhoades. 

Rhoades and Flynn previously worked on HBO’s Sharp Objects. Rhoades received a bunch of Utopia scripts and read them until the wee hours. “It’s a different side of Gillian,” she said, with lots of “wicked humor.”

Tong Wars Brought to Life on Cinemax 

Martial arts drama Warrior begins season two on Cinemax Oct. 2. Based on the writings of Bruce Lee, it’s about the brutal Tong Wars of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 19th century. After proving his worth as a fighter, Ah Sahm becomes hatchet man for the Hop Wei gang. 

Warrior shoots in Cape Town. Creator Jonathan Tropper said producers needed to build a “self-contained world” — streets, alleys and buildings from 1800s California — and South Africa made
that possible. 

Immigration was a hot issue when Warrior takes place, and still is. “We tell a story from 1870 that’s still true today,” said Tropper. “A country built by immigrants, yet we struggle with our relationship with immigrants.”

New AMC Series Goes Beyond ‘The Walking Dead’ 

The Walking Dead: World Beyond debuts Oct. 4 on AMC, following the first generation raised in the post-apocalyptic world. Two teen sisters, Hope and Iris, set out on “a grand adventure,” as co-creator Matt Negrete puts it, and run into a bit of trouble, including zombies the series refers to as “empties.” 

Viewers won’t find Walking Dead characters in
the spinoff. “This is a whole other thing,” co-creator Scott M. Gimple said. “You won’t see Rick Grimes walking around the corner, saying, ‘Hey kids,
what’s up?’ ”

Negrete said World Beyond has similar horror and suspense, but “a bit more hopeful tone.”

The show is shot in Richmond, Virginia. It was slated for an April premiere, but COVID jammed things up. Gimple hopes World Beyond will provide a bit of entertainment in these trying times. “The show offers people an escape,” he said. “An escape from their homes, from the monotony, from the pressure people are feeling.” λ

Walmart on Tuesday announced a new service offering, Walmart+, that designed to compete—even undercut—Amazon’s popular Prime service.

For $98 a year, Walmart+ will offer members free shipping on orders of $35 or more, covering more than 160,000 items. There’s a self-service checkout option using a smart phone app that will benefit members when they do venture out to Walmart stores. And Walmart+, which undercuts the $119-a-year Amazon Prime on price, delivers a 5-cents-per-gallon break on gas at Walmart stations. 

One of the big questions about the new service offering: Will Walmart+ include a video component, a la Amazon Prime Video, to draw users to the platform?

Presently, Walmart has partnered with Microsoft on a joint bid to acquire Chinese short-form video platform TikTok. Walmart and Microsoft are bidding against Oracle. Analysts peg the sales price to ultimately come in between $20 billion - $30 billion. 

Notably, Walmart sold its transactional video platform, Vudu, to Comcast’s Fandango division back in April. Vudu would have seemed like a logical starting point to build a multi-faceted video platform, a la Amazon Prime Video, that encompasses everything from SVOD to AVOD to transactional channels.  Walmart also has strong ties to content channels dating back to its leading position as a DVD retailer in the aughts. 

Speaking during a press call Monday, Janey Whiteside, Walmart's chief customer officer,.called Walmart+ “the ultimate life hack.”

For now, at least, analysts seem underwhelmed by the program

"My sense is they are going to do a bit more to entice people into this, because as it stands it's not a bad program but it's not a great program," Neil Saunders, an analyst at research firm GlobalData, told CNET. "When you look at Amazon Prime, it's just light-years ahead.”

Walmart+, Saunders added, also faces the wind drag of “subscription fatigue caused by more established services like Amazon Prime, Netflix and Spotify, which already have inroads to consumer credit cards. 

“For a $35 minimum and $98 annual fee, this is a thin gruel,” said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail research and consulting firm, to the New York Times. 

Influential Sanford Bernstein media analyst Todd Juenger has long believed in the power of subscription video on demand king Netflix, predicting that the service would top 300 million worldwide subscribers by 2024. Now, in his most recent report, Juenger notes that in Brazil -- the second largest Netflix market behind the U.S. -- Netflix customers now outpace pay TV subscribers. 

Netflix’s growth in Brazil has been rapid. According to Juenger, there were about 6.5 million Netflix customers in Brazil in 2017, more than doubling to 17 million by 2020. Pay TV, with about 16 million customers in 2020, lost about 3 million subscribers in the same time frame, the analyst wrote. 

“Brazil matters: at 17 million plus subs, it is almost certainly Netflix’s largest market outside the U.S. in number of subscribers,” Juenger wrote. “And we expect many of the dynamics at work there are also playing out across other foreign countries, especially middle income/emerging markets.” 

Even at No. 2, Brazil is still far behind the U.S. market, which has about 73 million subscribers. Globally, Netflix has about 193 million customers. But even in the U.S., the gap is narrowing. According to MoffettNathanson, there were about 79 million traditional pay TV customers in the U.S. in the second quarter, down from 80 million in Q1. 

According to Juenger’s report, Netflix’s entrance into the Brazilian market wasn’t easy. It cracked the largest country in South America in 2011, and pretty much had the SVOD space to itself until 2015, when its first competitor -- Globoplay, a streaming service from Portuguese-language content producer Globo -- entered the scene. 2015 also was the beginning of a devastating recession and high unemployment in Brazil, and though Globoplay was priced at about one-third of Netflix, it only has about 6.5 million customers today. 

Juenger added that Netflix has prevailed despite Globo’s refusal to license any of its Portuguese-language content to the streamer. So, in a country where 99% of the population speaks Portuguese, Netflix has managed to attract three times the subscribers of its largest competitor by offering content in a language most don’t necessarily understand (English and Spanish) at a higher price (about 32 Brazilian real per month, according to Juenger). Granted, many Brazilians speak several languages and economic factors likely played a big role in the shift from traditional pay TV, but those alone don't explain Netflix's huge popularity in the country.

“Netflix provides a superior product at a quarter of the price of pay TV, and can be shared across different households much more easily than a pay TV subscription,” Juenger wrote, adding that Netflix hasn’t fueled growth by keeping prices low. 

“Netflix has raised prices of its Standard plan five times since its introduction in September 2011, more than doubling in nominal terms and up 37% in constant domestic currency,”  Juenger continued.

According to the analyst, Brazilians are watching a wide variety of programming, but not the same as their U.S. counterparts. According to Juenger, the top shows in Brazil are mostly Netflix originals, and mostly in English. He added that 58% of the shows that made the Brazilian Top 10 never made the U.S. Top 10.  

Competition in Brazil is expected to heat up in the next several months, with Disney Plus slated to launch in mid-November and HBO Max next year. But Juenger sees little impact from these services because he believes they are primarily competing on price -- Disney Plus at a 12% discount to Netflix and HBO Max still undisclosed. Amazon (the online retailer, not the rain forest) launched its full Prime package (video and the free delivery service) in 2019 and has grown quickly -- in September 2019 Amazon claimed Brazil had the fastest rise in Prime members in the online retailer's history. Still, that could be mainly because of pricing -- Prime is offered at a 70% discount to Netflix -- and free product delivery.         

“We doubt any of these services will be able to match Netflix's popularity in Brazil,” Juenger wrote, citing Google search statistics that show interest in Netflix far outweighs the competition. “We believe this is driven by Netflix being the first-mover and only relevant streaming service in Brazil for a while (not different than in other countries), as well as due to its massive production of high-profile content and an underlying strong technology base.” 

Comic books have been a prime source of TV shows for some time, but the trend has hit what some are calling a second wave, the newer shows having some fun at the expense of superheroes. Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, Amazon’s The Boys and HBO Max’s Doom Patrol all have new seasons, and these comic book offspring offer an offbeat take on the superhero genre that dominates both movies and comics. 

“Superheroes are so omnipresent right now, and some shows look to turn that upside down,” said Eric Kripke, creator and executive producer on The Boys. “We feel like the audience is really hungry for the reaction, the deconstruction to how much superhero stuff is out there.”

Season two of The Boys arrives Friday, Sept. 4. Based on the comic book franchise by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, it’s a cheeky look at what happens when superheroes abuse their powers. 

Kripke has long been what he called a “superfan” of Ennis’s comics, and was crushed to not get to produce Preacher, which was based on an Ennis comic and ran on AMC 2016-2019. When The Boys was in the works, Kripke pushed hard for a role in it. 

Comic Crush 

Comic books have long been a source for TV series, and the genre has hit a high point in the last decade. AMC debuted The Walking Dead, from a Robert Kirkman comic, in 2010. Netflix had Daredevil, Jessica Jones, The Iron Fist and Luke Cage, all from Marvel. The CW has Riverdale, which stemmed from Archie Comics, and the DC Comics-inspired “Arrowverse,” including Arrow, Supergirl, Batwoman and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. HBO’s Peabody Award-winning Watchmen was originally a DC Comics series.

“The more outlets that are ordering original programs, the more they will turn to existing I.P., and comics are an ideal source,” Myles McNutt, assistant professor of communication and theatre arts at Old Dominion University and contributor to The AV Club, said. “They offer a wealth of existing source material, sometimes spanning over decades, and their stories are often serialized, giving producers a strong framework to
work from.”

Season two of Doom Patrol started June 25. The characters include Negative Man, Crazy Jane and Robotman. HBO Max calls them “DC’s strangest group of heroes.” 

“There’s a lot of layers to the show,” Jeremy Carver, executive producer and showrunner said. “Our superheroes don’t even like superheroes.”

The Boys sees some pretty ordinary humans take on a self-reverential gang of superheroes. “The superhero stuff out there is so overwhelming that someone had to take the piss out of it,” Kripke said. 

Season two of The Umbrella Academy begins on Netflix July 31. Based on a comic book series from My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way, it is the story of 43 babies born to unconnected women who showed no signs of pregnancy. Seven are adopted by a billionaire, who trains them to save the world. 

Creator Steve Blackman was not familiar with the comic franchise, but was intrigued when he found out Way was behind it. He saw it not as “a graphic novel about superheroes, but a story about a dysfunctional family.”

Moving In New Directions

There are significant challenges to turning print stories to television, and doing so in a way that wins over diehard fans of the comics. The half-dozen Marvel shows on Netflix, for one, did not enjoy particularly long runs. 

Producers say the biggest challenge is when to be faithful to the source material and when to take it in a different direction. “You cannot do a one-to-one translation,” Kripke said. “Trying to adapt it word-for-word would be disappointing for everybody.”

Kripke described his strategy as “take what you love from the comic and remix it for the show,” which he likened to “an incredibly stressful game of Jenga.”

Blackman mentioned being “inspired by the source material and bringing my own voice to it. Ultimately, you want to respect the existing fans while attracting a whole new audience.”

Comic books offer a rich palette for producers and a trove of established entertainment brands as more and more networks hunt for compelling original content. “If there was once a time when people presumed that a comic book meant a superhero story for young kids, the breadth of adaptations across both film and television has shifted that discourse,” McNutt said, “meaning that the
industry has more latitude to explore the medium’s thematic and generic range.” 

Amazon is downplaying a Protocol report that said the company is looking to add 24/7 live programming to its Amazon Prime Video offering.

In an email sent to Next TV Wednesday afternoon, an Amazon rep said job postings for software engineers and product managers emphasizing live and linear programming experience only relate to existing teams focused on local broadcast offerings that are already within the Amazon Prime Video Channels portfolio. They are not part of any new strategic expansion of live and linear video programming, the company said.

Also read: Amazon Prime Video Set to Go Live and Linear

Citing an example, the company said ViacomCBS’s CBS All Access, one of the more popular SVOD services that’s disaggregated by Amazon and resold through the Prime Video Channels app, allows subscribers to stream their local CBS affiliate station.

Amazon also cited Canada’s Stack TV and Eurosport in the UK and Denmark as examples of Prime Video Channels content brands that also allow users to access 24/7 station streams.

Visit Next TV to read more stories like this one. 

The Amazon rep said “hundreds” of live linear broadcast feeds are currently enabled via Prime Video Channels worldwide.

Amazon’s description of its activities differs widely from Protocol’s story, which describes Amazon Prime Video as being on the cusp of a major differentiation of the typical SVOD model, which is primarily focused on on-demand video programming.

Quoting an unidentified industry insider, Protocol said Amazon is “actively pursuing deals to license live and linear programming."

“We are expanding not just the breadth of live content we offer, but the depth of the experience," one Amazon want ad said. "This is a transformative opportunity, the chance to be at the vanguard of a program that will revolutionize Prime Video, and the live streaming experience of customers everywhere.”

Add professional beach volleyball to the list of sports returning to the field and to television.

The Association of Volleyball Professionals said it will replace its suspended 2020 season with a Champions Cup Series that will be televised by Amazon Prime Video, NBC and NBCSN over the weekends of July 18-19, July 25-26 and Aug.1-2.

“We’re looking forward to showcasing the AVP and the new Champions Cup Series on NBC and NBCSN this summer,” Gary Quinn, VP, programming & owned properties, NBC Sports said. “It’s exciting to see the best teams and best players back on the sand, and providing fans with the highest-level of competition in beach volleyball.”

The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the NBA and NHL seasons, postponed the start of baseball season, pushed the Olympics back to 2021 and cancelled the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament and other college sports.

Losing sports has cost TV networks ratings and ad revenues.

Many sports leagues have started to institute plans to return to play, notably the PGA Tour coming back last weekend and horse racing with the Belmont Stakes being run this weekend.

The AVP events will be held without fans in attendance. Each event will have a $200,000 purse, plus a $100,000 bonus poop for the tests with the top finishes.

Amazon Prime Video will stream matches throughout the entire series.

NBC will air an early-round men’s match on July 18 and the women’s final on July 19.

NBCSN will carry one final match in the second and third weekend that will be simulcast by Amazon.

“Since the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have stayed committed to our athletes, fans and partners to find a safe and responsible way for our sport to continue in 2020,” said Donald Sun, owner/CEO of the AVP. “The AVP Champions Cup Series allows us to keep our footprint small, regulate safety protocols and still provide top-flight beach volleyball competition for fans to watch via our long-standing partners NBC and Amazon Prime Video.”

Streaming services and cable networks used social media Saturday night and early Sunday morning to support the African-American community as protests continue to take place around the country over the death of George Floyd earlier this week in Minneapolis while in police custody.  

Netflix in a tweet said, “we have a platform and we have a duty to our Black members, employees, creators and talent to speak up.” The streaming service added, “To be silent is complicit. Black lives matter.”

[embed]https://twitter.com/netflix/status/1266829242353893376[/embed]

Amazon Prime Video also tweeted that it stands by the black community. "Together we stand with the Black community — colleagues, artists, writers, storytellers, producers, our viewers — and all allies in the fight against racism and injustice." 

[embed]https://twitter.com/PrimeVideo/status/1266942044800344065[/embed]

Hulu also tweeted: "We support Black lives. Today, and every day. You are seen. You are heard. And we are with you."

[embed]https://twitter.com/hulu/status/1266913549512658946[/embed]

Cable networks TV One and Starz also tweeted its support for Black Lives Matter as well as organizations such as the NAACP and ColorofChange.org.

[embed]https://twitter.com/tvonetv/status/1267093474303606784[/embed][embed]https://twitter.com/STARZ/status/1266927031876325381[/embed]

Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on Friday was charged with third degree murder after being filmed on May 25 kneeling on Floyd’s neck while trying to arrest him. The incident has sparked days of protests and unrest around the country. 

RELATED: CNN Crew Arrested in Minneapolis 

Streamed historical and crime dramas are drawing the most interest from video watchers during the pandemic, at least when it comes to Wikipedia perusers.

According to MIDiA Research, whose clients include Disney, Sony, Amazon, and Google, of the top 10 most viewed Wikipedia "TV show" pages April 29 (see chart) , were all streamed content, and all on either Netflix of Hulu.

The first, says MIDiA, shows streaming's leading position in the "zeitgeist" content sphere during the pandemic. And given that the shows are all on two services, and that six of the ten are UK productions, MIDiA's second big takeaway is that Disney+ and Apple TV+ "are not yet making the kind of sustained impact required for them to be perceived as originators of compelling new content."

Apple's top Wikipedia'd offering was Defending Jacob at 13th place and Disney's The Mandalorian was 16th.

That domination by history and crime is in contrast to the pre-pandemic December lists' top 10, which included reality, scripted drama, comedy, sci-fi, fantasy and animation.

The research company says the appeal of historical dramas could be the attraction of escapism in a hunkered-down viewership, but says the rise in the appeal of crime dramas is harder to pin down, though it says it might be the complexity of the storylines for folks with the time to to puzzle them out, just as detective novels thrived during the Great Depression of the 1930's.

A Wikipedia view does not necessarily translate into a video view, of course. But the company points out that as a leading indicator, Wikipedia page views "means that the viewer has specifically decided to read a page about a show, denoting their interest in a way that a casual google search does not."

Online retail giant Amazon said it has renewed its streaming deal for the National Football League’s Thursday Night Football package, including receiving exclusive rights for one game in the 2020 season.

The three-year deal gives Amazon the digital rights to distribute 11 TNF games to its nearly 150 million Amazon Prime subscribers in more than 200 countries. The games will be aired on broadcast television by Fox Corp., as well as the NFL’s own NFL Network.

In addition, Amazon will get exclusive digital rights to one Saturday game in the second half of the 2020 regular season. That game also will be aired on broadcast TV, in keeping with the NFL’s long-standing commitment, in the participating teams’ home markets.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But Amazon reportedly paid about $65 million per season a season in its last two-year deal with the league, and $50 million in the one-year deal signed in 2017.

"We are thrilled to renew our Thursday Night Football deal with the NFL, and are excited to expand our relationship to include exclusive global streaming rights to an additional regular season game in 2020," said Amazon vice president of global sports video Marie Donoghue, in a press release. "We know Prime members and the Twitch community around the world love the NFL, and we remain committed to giving them the best and most customizable streaming experience possible, with a broad selection of premium content available at their fingertips."

Thursday Night Football drew an average audience of 15.4 million viewers on Fox, the NFL Network, FOX Deportes, NFL digital, FOX Sports digital, Prime Video, Twitch, and Verizon Media mobile properties in 2019, a 4% increase compared to the prior year. About 1 million of those viewers watched via streaming on Amazon Prime, Twitch, NFL digital, Fox Sports digital and Verizon mobile properties, up 43% increase over the prior year.

"As our relationship has expanded, Amazon has become a trusted and valued partner of the NFL,” NFL chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp said in a press release. “Extending this partnership around Thursday Night Football continues our critical mission of delivering NFL games to as many fans in as many ways as possible both in the United States and around the world."

While the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the cancellation of the NBA and NHL regular seasons and has postponed major league baseball play, the NFL is expected to begin its regular season relatively on time. Some reports have said the league is considering opening its regular season, originally slated for September, in mid-October, minus buy-weeks. That, according to most pundits, would allow for a minimal disruption of the regular season and playoffs, with the Super Bowl to be played in late February. 

Amazon’s willingness to pony up for the Thursday Night games also has renewed speculation that the retail giant may be willing to get more deeply involved in sports, particularly in the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, which comes up for renewal in 2022.

Sunday Ticket rights are currently held by AT&T’s DirecTV satellite TV unit, but the telco has said in the past that it may be willing to let the package go to another distributor. 

“It’s indicative that the streamers in general will have a substantial role to play in the next round of NFL negotiations, and it looks like Amazon has the pole position,” LHB Sports, Media & Entertainment president and CEO Lee Berke, said of the significance of the Amazon deal.

The NFL has already begun negotiations for broadcast rights for the 2023 season and MoffettNathanson media analyst Michael Nathanson has estimated pricing could rise as much as 75% for the new deals. 

For a platform like Comcast/NBCUniversal’s Peacock, the pandemic represents the best of times and the most challenging of moments, all rolled into one. 

Speaking to reporters last week the day before the streaming service conducted its limited launch on Comcast’s X1 and Flex video platforms, Peacock Chairman Matt Strauss lamented the massive disruption the COVID-19 pandemic wrought on NBCU’s original national launch plan for Peacock, which was tied directly to the Tokyo Olympics in mid-July.

Those Olympic Games may have been pushed back to 2021, but quarantined audiences across North America and Europe are consuming record amounts of linear and OTT television. Strauss acknowledged a “historic” opportunity for platforms like Peacock to find audiences that have never been so ready to engage.

Rather than pull back on Peacock’s mid-summer plans, Strauss said his group might launch the streaming service even earlier than July 15. 

“Now more than ever,” Strauss declared, describing the urgency and relevance of his video service. Just a few months ago, some wondered if Peacock—along with Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Quibi, and all the rest of the “combatants” involved in the so-hyped “streaming wars”—were wading into a business with not nearly enough eye balls to support it all. 

Well, these days, eyeballs they got. But with Hollywood’s production studios shut down, and operatives largely confined to post-producing whatever is already shot and in the can, or whatever can be shot from remote home-office locations, SVOD services could soon find themselves facing a pandemic-era dilemma your local grocery store chain is already real familiar with: Sure, the lines are out the door, but there’s no eggs or toilet paper. 

Strauss, for example, conceded that many of Peacock’s planned originals now won’t be available until 2021. 

With this mind, we surveyed the SVOD services in an effort to determine which are stocked up and ready to meet the increased audience demand, and which ones might run into trouble. Here, in no particular order, is our service-by-service analysis of how the major SVOD services stack up amid the pandemic production panic. 

NETFLIX
Introducing his “Quarterly SVOD Tracker” report last week, MoffettNathanson  analyst Michael Nathanson said there’s a reason why Netflix just saw its stock spike to record levels. 

“The world is trapped indoors, live sports on TV is non-existent, theaters are closed, unemployment is spiking to terrible levels, and new content is impossible to produce,” Nathanson wrote. “Who wins? The one company with an incredibly cheap price point, a gargantuan library of new and original content to satisfy most demand and broaden distribution.”

Just this past Friday, Netflix introduced complete first seasons of two new series: Kenya Barris sitcom #blackAF and reality/dating show Too Hot to Handle. The service’s Tiger King, which launched in March and seemed to come out of nowhere, is now one of its most-watched series historically. Eight new shows will be available for streaming on Netflix this week. And Ryan Murphy's WWII-era limited series Hollywood is set for a May 1 debut.

Even if it scales back to half that number each week, Netflix should be positioned well.

Netflix’s library is smaller than in year’s past, but its selection still includes more than 2,000 TV shows and nearly 4,000 movie titles, according to a tally published by Reelgood in February. 

“Netflix is in a class of its own, and its success did not come overnight,” said Robert Russo, president of consulting company RNR Media. “It was years of planning, a tremendous investment for a wide array of quality content, and a model that set the mold for this new online platform. Whoever has the most programming they have stocked up on, and I do believe that is Netflix, is best positioned to weather this storm.”

AMAZON PRIME VIDEO and HULU
Like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu have built their digital brands around a steady flow of original content and library product. Neither spends nearly as much as Netflix and its $17.3 billion content budget for 2020, according to BMO Capital Markets. But each has plenty of originals in the can, and at this point, a more diversified content portfolio. 

Amazon Prime Video, for example, is augmented by a transactional video business and services like Amazon Channels. And for now, it has originals like the just-premiered latest season of Bosch to keep viewers hooked. 

Hulu, meanwhile, has the benefit of Disney’s myriad content channels. The newly established “FX on Hulu” pipeline, for example, just yielded the Phyllis Schlafly biopic series Mrs. America. 

“Overall, I think the ‘rich will stay rich’ among these streaming services during this quarantine. They have enough product available to endure, even if they have to slow down on releasing new product,” noted Robert Russo. “But if this production shutdown lags on, the norm for now will have to be finding new ways to produce content remotely while placing a greater emphasis on the library product.”

PEACOCK
For the national rollout of its $4.99-a-month subscription premium tier ($7.99 without any ads) in mid-July, Peacock is touting 15,000 movies and TV shows, with a flurry of originals highlighting the mix. (As mentioned, the service is already deployed into select Comcast pay TV homes.)

Aldous Huxley adaptation Brave New World is “essentially done,” Strauss said. He added that he’s “optimistic” that reboots Punky Brewster and Saved By the Bell will be done for this year, as well. Beyond those shows, much of Peacock’s plan for scripted originals will likely have to wait until 2021, with production studios shut down. 

Also read: Comcast’s Peacock Streaming Service Created From Traditional TV’s Winning Recipe

Given that reality, Peacock has pivoted to promoting its robust library of recent-era sitcom hits—30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and Two and a Half Men were highlighted in last week’s press release, for example. It’s also plugging late-night shows like Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers that can be remotely sustained in their hosts living quarters. 

“The advantage for Peacock, among other services with significant libraries, is this evergreen product,” said Robert Russo. “It gives you plenty of content to access. But with fewer original shows at launch, you have to wonder if these shows many people have already seen will be able to carry it.”

Strauss thinks they can, at least for a while.

“We’re really fortunate that we have such a vast library of content that we know is going to resonate,” Strauss said. “Viewers are seeking programming that’s comfortable, that’s familiar and nostalgic. And families are spending a lot more quality time together. This provides a unique opportunity to share common experience, to revisit some of their favorites. It plays to our strengths.

Strauss also noted that Peacock will also exists as a skinnier (7,500 series without originals) free, ad-supported service. Given the new market dynamics, Peacock could actually thrive in that iteration, he said, adding, “Nothing’s more affordable than free.” 

HBO MAX
AT&T/WarnerMedia’s $14.99-a-month entry into the streaming wars is still set to launch in May (date still not specified) with an announced 10,000 hours of content, including movies and shows from Warner Bros., New Line, DC Entertainment, TNT, TBS, truTV, and the Cartoon Network.

WarnerMedia kept the original series announcements humming all through the winter and early spring. But even the most anticipated among that flurry—the unscripted Friends reunion special—couldn’t get done before the sudden COVID-19 shutdown. 

Also read: HBO Max: Everything You Need to Know About the Big OTT Service AT&T Has Its Entire Future Riding On (No Pressure!)

Again, WarnerMedia has a library to fall back on—notably, the HBO vault.

“Given the caliber of many of its shows, I can see the audiences discovering or revisiting dramas like The Sopranos and The Wire on HBO Max,” noted Russo. “This could be enough to carry them for now.”

Some current HBO shows like Real Time with Bill Maher, meanwhile, are being shot remotely, with the host situated in front of a blue screen at his home. 

Appearing on CNBC over the weekend, Jeffrey Hirsch, CEO of HBO rival Starz, said much of his premium network’s content is shot a year in advance. So for now, it’s a matter of remotely conducting aspects of post-production from remote locations, and Starz’s production pipeline is minimally impacted. At least on the HBO side of the business, it’s probably not unreasonable to suspect a similar production workflow is in place. 

“The internet is still our lifeline, more so than ever before” said Mike Tankel, partner at marketing and development firm To Be Continued. “But, for now, the challenge is keeping the momentum going at a time when production is at a standstill.”

DISNEY PLUS
Considering the breakout success of recent ABC special The Disney Family Singalong, an early example of a show that can be produced from remote “distanced” locations, viewers at the moment seem hungry for inspirational programming. And that alone can make the content in Disney Plus—which recently surpassed 50-million paid subscribers globally—even more appealing.

“Disney Plus, like Amazon Prime, was smart enough to lock us in to year-long deals, and that can make a huge difference if this quarantine extends indefinitely,” Tankel said. “Then there is its library, which includes the Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, Nat Geo and Disney brands.”

Also read: Disney Plus: How It Went From Zero to 28.6 Million in Less Than Three Months

Launched in the U.S. in November, Disney Plus touts a library of about 7,500 TV show episodes and 400 films. Those films include Onward, which wasn’t able to finish its U.S. theatrical window before the shutdown. 

But there could be trouble ahead. According to Nathanson’s latest “SVOD Tracker,” research firm HarrisX found that while Disney Plus managed to reach 27% of U.S. streaming households by March, there’s been a recent drop of -1,000 basis points among people who use the service on a daily basis.

This, Nathanson concluded, “may signify the need for more original content,” a need that’s emerging at a particularly bad time. 

APPLE TV PLUS
Nearly six months after launching, Apple’s big SVOD play is still only used in about 7% of U.S. streaming homes, according to HarrisX data. 

This, Nathanson said, “speaks to its very limited content offering and lack of library.”

Apple has offered its $4.99-a-month streaming service for free to purchasers of new Apple devices. At this point, only around 43% of the service’s limited user base is paying for a subscription. 

Also read: Is It Already Too Late for Apple TV Plus?

At the end of the year, when Apple starts asking many of those subscribers to pay, will any of them be enticed? With what limited content it already has at its disposal, Apple is trying. 

As another sign-up incentive, for example, Apple TV Plus has made some of its original shows free to watch for anyone during the pandemic. New and upcoming shows include Spike Jonze's upcoming Beastie Boys Story and special Oprah Talks on COVID-19. And just last Friday, Apple TV Plus introduced docuseries Home. Drama Defending Jacob, comedy Trying, and animated musical Central Park are expected in May. 

So far, only drama The Morning Show has generated early buzz. 

“Apple TV Plus still has not hooked me with a show,” Tankel noted.   

QUIBI
In its first week, Quibi launched with 50 individual shows, with another 175 shows planned to roll out by year end. But, with productions on host and minus the library content, Quibi is asking producers to shift to programming options that can be produced remotely and turned around quickly.

With the pandemic disrupting production of Quibi’s slate of current events-driven shows, which the mobile-first programming service umbrella-brands under the moniker “Daily Essentials,” producers are finding new, remote ways to tell their stories. 

Also read: Can Quibi Build a Brand From Scratch Amid Stiff Streaming Competition?

For example, Tim Kash, who hosts music show Pop5, moved his scaled-down set into his garage. And Jimmy Mondal, host of videogame-themed show Speedrun, is shooting from his living room.

“On the majority of our shows, our partners have been very entrepreneurial," Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg told The Hollywood Reporter just before the service’s April 6 launch. "And, you know, they’re delivering." Katzenberg told THR that he was expecting the premieres of only two shows to be delayed, including Hot Off the Mic, which relies on recent footage of comedy club sets, and the 60 Minutes-inspired 60 in 6, which is on hold after an outbreak inside CBS News.

Various metrics, including app downloads, point to a slow start for Quibi, however. And the pandemic seems to be posing a more existential challenge to Quibi than the toughened task of getting its shows made. 

Essentially, consumers are asking, why do I need to watch TV on my phone when my living room TV set is right here?

Amazon is launching a new promotional program that lets its Prime members preview the first seasons of shows on participating Amazon Channels SVOD services at no extra charge.

The selection of shows will refresh each month. The first set of shows in the program include Showtime’s Kidding, which stars Jim Carrey is a kids TV icon. The show re-teams Carrey with Michael Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Also featured is Starz historical drama Black Sails. 

From now until March 31, here’s what’s streamable for Prime members:.

Amazon Channels is service that lets Amazon Prime members sign up for subscription streaming services through Amazon. The online retail giant collects a percentage of the subscription revenue and handles the customer relationship. 

For most of the SVOD services participating in the program’s first month, Amazon Channels supplies the bulk of their subscriber base. 

Amazon Prime Video has set a March 13 premiere date for its new series Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse, the streaming service said Tuesday.

Based on the 1961 novel from the famed mystery storywriter, the series stars Rufus Sewell as man involved in a homicide investigation after his name is discovered in the shoe of a murdered woman. His push to find out why his name was on the list leads him to the Pale Horse home, where witches are rumored to live. As other names on the list are found murdered, he starts to fear for his own life and sanity, according to Amazon.

Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse also stars Kaya Scodelario (Spinning Out), Bertie Carvel (Doctor Foster); Sean Pertwee (Gotham); Henry Lloyd-Hughes (Killing Eve); Poppy Gilbert (Call the Midwife); Madeleine Bowyer (Black Mirror); and Ellen Robertson (Snowflake).

HBO fought off a strong showing from streaming services Amazon Prime and Hulu to finish with the most Golden Globes Awards wins on Sunday night, according to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

HBO finished with four Golden Globe Award wins from its 15 nominations, topping all cable networks and streaming services (the broadcast networks were shut out of this year's nominations). Amazon Prime Video and Hulu were the only other distributors to win multiple awards with two each during NBC’s live awards telecast.

Netflix, which led all networks and streaming services with 17 Globe award nominations, finished with just one win in the television category: the best actress in a TV drama series award for Olivia Colman for her starring role in The Crown.

HBO was paced by two wins each for Succession, including best TV drama series honors, and for Chernobyl, which won the Globe for best limited series or motion picture made for television.

Amazon Prime’s Fleabag also won two Golden Globe Awards, including best comedy series and best actress in a comedy series for Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The sophomore series matched its wins in the same categories during the Emmy Awards this past September.

Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres were awarded lifetime achievement awards during the telecast, which was hosted by Ricky Gervais.

The winners of the 2020 Golden Globes Awards in the television category are as follows:

Best Television Series, Drama

"Succession" -- (HBO)

Best Performance by an Actress in a TV Series, Drama

Olivia Colman, "The Crown" (Netflix)

Best Performance by an Actor in a TV Series, Drama

Brian Cox, "Succession"(HBO)

Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy

"Fleabag" (Amazon Prime)

Best Performance by an Actress in a TV Series, Musical or Comedy

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, "Fleabag" (Amazon Prime)

Best Performance by an Actor in a TV Series, Musical or Comedy

Ramy Youssef, "Ramy” (Hulu)

Best Television, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

"Chernobyl" (HBO)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Russell Crowe, "The Loudest Voice" (Showtime)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Michelle Williams, "Fosse/Verdon" (FX)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Stellan Skarsgard, "Chernobyl" (HBO)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for TV

Patricia Arquette, "The Act" (Hulu)

Amazon Prime's Fleabag continued its strong TV awards season, winning the Golden Globe award for best comedy series while series star Phoebe Waller-Bridge took home the Globe for best actress in a comedy series.

Fleabag, which won the Emmy Award for best comedy series in September, beat out HBO's Barry, Netflix's The Kominsky Method and The Politician, and Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. 

Related: HBO, Amazon Prime Rule Primetime Emmy Awards 

Waller-Bridge also repeated her Emmy Award win for best actress in a comedy with a Golden Globes win in the same category. She won the Globe award over competitors Christina Applegate (Dead to Me), Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Kirsten Dunst (On Becoming a God in Central Florida) and Natasha Lyonne (Russian Doll).

Also on the comedy front, Ramy Youssef won the Golden Globes Award for best actor in comedy for his role in Hulu's comedy series Ramy.

Dish Network has finally joined the legions of pay TV operators that let subscribers access Amazon Prime Video directly on the main interface of their set-top.

Dish’s Hopper 3 DVR will now have the SVOD platform natively embedded, allowing the dwindling ranks of Dish subscribers with the device to access shows like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel without toggling between HDMI inputs.

Just like it has with Comcast’s X1 platform for several years now, Amazon Prime can be accessed via voice control—users merely say, “Launch Prime Video” into their Dish voice remote.

Hopper 3 users can also stream Amazon Prime Video 4K content.

“Rather than switching between inputs, devices or even remotes to watch Prime Video, our customers get the convenience of having all of their programming in one place, providing more value to the Hopper 3 experience,” said Brian Neylon, group president of Dish TV, in a statement.

Amazon Prime joins Dish’s catalog of integrated video streaming options, including Netflix, YouTube and YouTube Kids.

Amazon Prime Video Thursday released a first-look video for its new original series Hunters, which will debut in 2020.

The series, executive produced by Academy Award-winner Jordan Peele and starring Academy Award-winner Al Pacino, follows a diverse band of Nazi hunters living in 1977 New York City who have discovered that hundreds of high-ranking Nazi officials are living among us and conspiring to create a Fourth Reich in the U.S., according to Amazon. 

Hunters, produced by Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Sonar Entertainment, was created by David Weil (Moonfall), who serves as executive producer and co-showrunner alongside executive producer Nikki Toscano. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (American Horror Story) directed the pilot and is an executive producer along with Win Rosenfeld (The Twilight Zone, Lorena) from Monkeypaw Productions, Nelson McCormick (Prison Break), and Tom Lesinski (Mr. Mercedes) from Sonar Entertainment.

The 2019-20 Fall TV season officially kicks off this week with several cable and streaming services debuting shows as the broadcast networks launch their new and returning series.

Epix’s drama series Godfather of Harlem debuts Sept. 29, and stars Forest Whitaker as notorious gangster Bumpy Johnson, who looks to take back the Harlem underworld in the late 1960s after a long jail stint.

Streaming service Shudder on Sept. 26 will launch a reboot of the classic horror anthology series Creepshow, while Amazon Prime Video on Sept. 27 debuts a special musical finale for its Emmy-winning series Transparent.

Below are video trailers and premiere dates for several shows debuting this week on cable networks and streaming services:

Sept. 23 -- Team Kaylie (comedy) -- Netflix

Sept. 25 -- Buzz (documentary) -- HBO

Sept. 25 -- Cake (animation) -- FXX

Sept. 25 -- Crank Yankers (returning series) -- Comedy Central

Sept. 25 -- It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (returning series) -- FXX

Sept. 25 -- Liza on Demand (returning series) -- YouTube

Sept. 26 -- Untold Stories of Hip Hop (music series) -- WEtv

Sept. 27 -- In the Shadow of the Moon (movie) -- Netflix

Sept. 27 -- The Politician (drama) -- Netflix

Sept, 27 -- Van Helsing (returning series) -- Syfy

African-American consumers continue to lead the consumption of content across multiple platforms, according to a recent Nielsen 2019 Diverse Intelligence Series (DIS) report on African Americans.

Nielsen’s It’s In The Bag: Black Consumers’ Path to Purchase report states that African-Americans continue to be voracious consumers of television content, spending more than 50 hours watching live and time-shifted television a week in first quarter 2019, over 10 hours more than the total population, according to the research company.

“It doesn’t matter how many other streaming services we have access to, traditional television viewing is still number one with the African-American population,” said Cheryl Grace, senior vice president of U.S. strategic community alliances and consumer engagement for Nielsen. “What that looks like is 91% of every African-American can be reached weekly via television primarily through what we’re watching in real time and what we save on our recording devices.”

The tv shows African-Americans are watching don't always match that of the general population as black viewers gravitate more towards content that reflect their images and storylines -- particularly among younger viewers. Among adults 18-34, only Fox’s 911 and Empire show up among the top 20 most watched shows for both the African-Americans and the total population. VH1’s Love & Hip Hop franchise, Black Inc. Crew and Fox’s  cancelled Star are among the top 10 most-watched shows in young, African-American households that are not ranked on the top 20 most-watched TV show list for the total population.

Despite  heavy usage of traditional media, African-American consumers are on the cutting edge of new content distribution platforms and devices. Overall, 61% of African Americans are fascinated by new technology and 37% are more likely than the total population to be the first among their peers to try new technology products, according to Nielsen.

That includes a whopping 96% of all African-American adults having and using a smartphone, compared to 95% of the total population, according to Nielsen. Further, African-Americans 35 and older surpass all consumers in their age group by 2% for smartphone ownership.

Not surprisingly, African-Americans spend more time consuming video on their android phones and iPhones compared to the total population. Nielsen reports that Blacks spend nearly 30 hours a week on websites and apps on their smartphones, more than three hours more than the all consumers as a whole.

Youtube is the most consumed entertainment app for African-Americans at 79%, while Netflix has the highest market share among subscription video on demand apps with 39%, according to Nielsen. Hulu is second with 15%, followed closely by Amazon Prime Video at 14%.

On the social media front, Facebook is the top choice for African-American adults, with more than 65% of black adults using the service, according to Nielsen. Grace added that African-Americans overindex in the use of other social media services such as Instagram, SnapChat, Pinetrest and Twitter compared to the total population.

Yet despite African American consumers’ high consumption of traditional and new media -- as well as an estimated annual buying power of $1.3 trillion dollars -- Grace said companies are not increasing ad dollars targeting black consumers. She added that about $18 billion was spent on African-American-focused media in 2018, an overall decline of 5% from the prior year, with declines in such platforms as cable television (down 1%), digital media (-12%), network TV (-13%) and syndicated TV (-11%)

“Unfortunately despite how much we watch television and look at our digital devices, it doesn’t add up to the [ad] spend that we’re seeing,” she said. “We’re watching more, and yet [advertisers] are spending less to reach us. This is a problem.”