Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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...

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.)

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