It might sound like sour grapes, but Netflix has suggested that Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May are not worth the money being paid out by rival streaming service Amazon Prime.

Netflix was one of a number of content creators known to have been in discussions with the former Top Gear presenters, and explained to Digital Spy how it used its own viewership data to determine whether or not to splash out on the popular trio.

Amazon Prime Video



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"We have past episodes of Top Gear, so we have a pretty good gauge of what audiences like," Netflix's Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt told us.

"Our buying decisions tend to be somewhat data-driven. We have a lot of data to get the deals we want, so there we go.

"Clearly it wasn't worth the money to make the deal... I think they sold themselves for way more money [than they're worth]."

Ellis O'Brien BBC



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With Clarkson, Hammond and May having a £160 million budget to make just 36 hour-long episodes, the team's new motoring show will have £4.4 million to spend per show. The currently unnamed series is scheduled to start airing next year.

Despite not deeming the former Top Gear stars worthy of the extortionate sums being paid, Hunt suggested that Netflix is unfazed by Amazon's significant spending power.

"We're much bigger, so we have bigger cheques to write," he said of Netflix's place in the market. "There might be other people ranting, but we're still in a good place."

UPDATED: Following our interview with Neil Hunt, Netflix's Chief Product Officer has added in a separate statement sent to Digital Spy: "There is an audience for everything and it is not up to us to judge if Amazon has paid too much or not."

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