Amazon's internal numbers on Prime Video | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's internal numbers on Prime Video

uk.reuters.com

40 pointsedf1359 comments

The headline makes it sound like a huge number, but when you break it down, it's minuscule compared to traditional broadcast.

The most recent Academy Awards show was the lowest rated in a decade, and it got 26 million people in what's called "live plus same day" which includes for people watching on their DVR's shortly after.

That's 26 million people in just a few hours for one show in one country. Amazon's five million came from 19 shows, "airing" across an entire year, in however many countries have Amazon Video.

If you were to break it down by same-day viewership, Amazon's ratings are lower than a local news show in a very small market.

I'm not criticizing Amazon, at all. I'm a paying subscriber and think it, Netflix, and similar services are a better vision of the future than what the broadcast and cable nets have put together. But it's way too early to tout the death of the broadcast industry, as so many like to do.

Also, The Grand Tour is awesome.

There's a small difference though, you don't need to pay to watch the Academy Awards (beyond owning a screen with a digital tuner).

Or subscribing to cable. A lot of people can't get OTA. (In the case of the Oscars specifically you could get it from ABC online.)

In all fairness, this is about Prime Video drawing people into the overall Amazon ecosystem (shopping, etc.) That said, most if not all of this prestige television has quite law viewership relative to traditional broadcast TV. Game of Thrones has about 10 million viewers on HBO. That wouldn't be terrible by broadcast standards, but it's about equivalent to a reality show like Survivor.

„tout the death of the broadcast industry“

Slightly OT: YouTube will be big in „live plus same day“ this year. Boxing match of KSI vs Joe Weller [1] drew 1.6 million live viewers and 16 Million on the (official) released video after. I'd estimate the announced fight of KSI vs Logan Paul in August to yield closer to 5 or up to 10 million live viewers with a massive „same day watching“ after.

Sure the content is not for everyone but might be a glimpse at what a younger generation prefers.

[1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5498574/youtube-stars-boxing-k...

A better comparison is Top Gear, the BBC show that was essentially the same as The Grand Tour. At it's absolute peak Top Gear drew live audiences of ~8 million people. When the BBC cancelled it (after Clarkson hit a producer) it was getting audiences of ~5 million. I'm sure you could double that number including on-demand and foreign audiences. It was a popular show.

To me these numbers show that Amazon have managed to compete reasonably favourably with the BBC, which is famous for being really good at making TV shows, within 5 years of starting to make their own content, they've built a platform that people are willing to use to watch that content, and they've developed a model that audiences are willing to pay for. That's huge.

I think the comparison would be more accurate if we had numbers for BBC's live viewers and those who streamed it for the rest of the year, since the Amazon view count includes people streaming weeks and months after the program debuted.

The figure of 8m for Top Gear must be UK only - I've seem 350m viewers claimed for some series/episodes.

By ripping off a BBC show to the point of hiring the stars.

This wasn't "5 million total viewers", this was "5 million incremental Prime subscribers specifically attributable to a desire to view these shows because it was the first thing they streamed". It would be analogous to HBO counting the number of subscribers it has added simply because of GoT or West World, but not to counting the total number of viewers for those shows.

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

At least it doesn't auto-play trailers like Netflix does on my PS4. I spend very little time in their app as a result of that.

funny because it (amazon video) auto plays trailers before shows on the iphone app

This decision was indeed perplexing. People don't like things that auto-play as a rule, I would be very surprised if this passed user testing.

This and the parent comment lend themselves to a bigger concern of mine: services not always owning the UX. Either the services have to design multiple apps leading to the kind of inconsistencies that arise naturally from that or the devices have to use some API against whatever UI they happen to support.

Basically, you have to re-learn these services depending on where you're playing them. I feel like Netflix has locked it down a bit but there's always smart TVs, media players, etc. that will never uniformly support a single UX for any given service.

> "People don't like things that auto-play as a rule"

Really? In amazon's case they auto play the next episode, so given that the user statyed up through the entire episode, that means they probably like that series and so like the next episode.

Also I find YouTube autoplays to be more often than not to be enjoyable by me. And I discover new stuff I like that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.

My GF's smart TV auto-plays next episodes, even cuts movie credits off after just a few seconds to try to bait us into the next thing. Maybe its just me, but I generally like to see the credits, hear the end music, etc. Rather than actually escorting us into the next video, this UI "feature" just compels us to shut the whole system down out of annoyance.

This is a standard Netflix feature. Netflix runs the same code on almost every (TV) platform: consoles, TVs, set-top-boxes, etc.

The windows 10 Netflix app seems to have a good compromise: When the credits (opening and closing) of some shows (maybe only ones produced by Netflix?) start there's a "Skip credits" or "Skip intro" button, but it's not automatic.

You can disable "Play next episode automatically" in your account settings on Netflix's website: https://www.netflix.com/HdToggle

The Netflix app on my smart TV honors that setting. Unfortunately, this setting does not stop Netflix from auto-playing the video when you first select it.

I often see trailers on Prime before a show starts. Really annoying.

Amazon Prime on a Roku is a little better than Netflix on the same device, mainly due to Netflix not wanting to directly expose their inventory. If you add in the non-prime inventory Amazon on Roku is light-years better than Netflix and includes the ability to add e.g. HBO channels, etc.

There's reasonable room for disagreement over features of Netflix and Amazon's video UIs, but I think we can all agree that Hulu's interface is horrible and consistently gets worse every time they change it.

> One big winner was the motoring series “The Grand Tour,” which stars the former presenters of BBC’s “Top Gear.” The show had more than 1.5 million first streams from Prime members worldwide, at a cost of $49 per subscriber in its first season.

BBC handed Amazon a win on a silver platter. They didn't need a writer, they didn't need a producer, they just bought the ones that BBC threw out. How did Netflix miss on Andy Wilman and Jeremy Clarkson?

From what i understand they did speak to a lot of networks and streaming services. Amazon won because of the huge budget they offered and the promise of autonomy.

It really does show as well. Some scenes in season one and two could never have been shown on the BBC.

Amazon outbid Netflix, plain and simple.

BBC had to toss Clarkson after he punched a producer.

I saw rumors a few days ago that The Grand Tour has already been canceled after the already ordered season 3. Really hope it isn't true because it is one of the biggest draws of Prime Video for me.

That rumor's coming from the Daily Mail, so I'd take it with an ocean's worth of salt until some sort of corroboration comes out elsewhere.

While I too hope it's just rumours I bet if it really happens netflix will snatch them up instantly. And if not we'll still have DRIVETRIBE.

That would be no surprise.

I used to be a big TG fan but didn't even finish this season. A lot of my friends used to be TG fans, and they've also quit watching.

It's not too hard to believe that the C/H/M formula has run its course for a lot more people than just my small sphere of friends.

The first season was Amazon's top draw (as this article indicates). The 2nd season seems to have largely been better received, not worse.

Seems very, very unlikely that Amazon would be canceling a show with those circumstances.

I could see the crew deciding to retire/stop doing the show, but I can't see Amazon canceling it.

> BBC handed Amazon a win on a silver platter.

Their hand was forced. Clarkson punched someone. They can’t just countenance physical violence because it’s a successful show. That would have had serious ramifications (rightfully so).

For all intents and purposes: Clarkson left. He gambled, and won. But it was a gambit, and I doubt Amazon execs will be keen on taking hits themselves. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some circumspect wording in the contracts related to covering exactly that case :)

From watching two seasons of The Grand Tour there also seems to be a clause in the contracts similar to "Jeremy and Andy get to do anything they want" - which probably reduces the risk of someone being punched dramatically.

The punch was not over creative differences, iirc. It was over a meal not being hot. Kind of the same risk nownas well, unless punching has been legalized :-)

Amazon's basically just cutting a check to "W. Chump & Sons" (The production company Wilman, Clarkson, Hammond and May each have a 25% share in) for the show. They supposedly have very little to do with the actual making of the show. The BBC was more involved, from my understanding.

I loved watching Top Gear and I generally like his politics, but even I wouldn't dare invest money in Clarkson with his history of behavior, even with a virtually guaranteed return.

Successful people are often volatile and impulsive. Not sure why that is but you see it in top executives, coaches, etc.

Those are just the ones you hear about. There are many successful people who aren't dysfunctional malcontents.

Doesn't remotely make it okay to hit people or change what I said.

And yet the BBC version of Top Gear is getting slated for 'just' 2.8 million viewers in the UK alone:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/top-gear-2017-ratings-...

[Edit - this is for the 2017 series]

Slightly offtopic, but my favourite knockoff of Top Gear is neither of the two successor shows but one made on a tiny fraction of its budget: Air an Rathad. It has adorable levels of enthusiasm and beautiful scenery without any of the bombast.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fky8c

Jeremy Clarkson had just assaulted a colleague following several other scandals, including racism rows. I assume they made a judgement that the reputational damage to their existing business wasn't worth it, whereas Amazon needed the boost.

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

Netflix has an impending cliff with Fox pulling shows to make them Hulu exclusives and Disney putting together their own streaming service in 2019.

They're doing a good job with their original content efforts, but I don't know if it'll be enough content quickly enough.

Not sure about Prime, but more and more of stuff on Netflix to me is great because it's available in French (and other) language or subtitle.

Great for my multi-lingual family. I almost don't care what the content is (well as long as it's appropriate) as long as they're getting immersion while watching.

I'm a bit surprised by that comment. I actually find Prime to have pretty good content and typically better movies than Netflix (who's movie library has been shrinking pretty drastically over the years).

If you haven't already watched it, I'd highly recommend Season 1 and 2 of "The Expanse" on Prime. There are a lot of pretty great shows on there as long as you don't rely on DC/Marvel shows for all your entertainment. Other shows that are reasonably acclaimed are:

- The Man in the High Castle

- Avatar: The Last Airbender

- The Nightmanager

- Mr. Robot

- Boardwalk Empire

- Downton Abbey

- Sneaky Pete

- Orphan Black

- Dr. Who

- Veep

- The Good Wife

- Transparent

- Hannibal

- Deadwood

- Curb your Enthusiasm

- The Wire

- Six Feet Under

- The Sopranos

The Expanse is great, both the book and the show. Smart of Amazon to pick it up.

The Expanse is SyFy, so new episodes go there (but really appreciate it on Amazon)

The HBO shows are gone sometime in 2018 I believe, at least the contract is up soon and HBO said they're keeping the shows to HBO Now instead AFAIK.

I watched the Expanse on Netflix. It's not really that good but I had downloaded it and was stuck on a plane.

Of the others the only two I hadn't watched a long time ago (e.g. Sopranos) that I would consider really good are Mr. Robot & Boardwalk Empire, both of which I had already watched elsewhere. What I like about Netflix is their originals are top notch.

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

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

Amazon Prime LTV is on the order of thousands of dollars per member. If they can convert new customers to Prime for ~$100 that is pretty cheap. Of course, media is a hit driven business, so they would have to blend the cost of all the shows that don't do as well as their headliners.

I personally don't like Prime shows other than Man in the High Castle. And they are increasingly pushing down other New Releases so you only see Prime shows above the fold on TV devices (Roku etc). But I understand they are playing the long game here and quality will probably improve. I used to dislike most of Netflix original shows, but now theres a steady lineup that I could watch regularly every week.

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

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

A lot of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 (most aired and streamed songs in the past week) are over 6 months old, including "Thunder" at #19 and "Perfect" at #2. "Today's top hits" is not "today's newest songs".

It's small compared to paid subscription offerings (or ad-supported free tiers of something like Spotify). Which means it basically works fine as background music but isn't great if you want to listen to specific things, especially current music.

It is. Amazon Prime Music's selection is dismal. I've discovered some great new music with it, but not a lot, and it takes a long time to filter through all the shovelware to find good stuff that I don't already own.

I get these titles in Apple Music daily playlists a lot too, so it's not just Amazon.

I see topX lists as "what studios want you to listen to". Only Spotify's discover weekly seems interesting at all.

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

Thanks, we've reverted the submission title to that of the article.

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