Ex-Top Gear presenter, along with Richard Hammond and James May, cost Jeff Bezos’ company a reported £160m to front motoring show on Prime service

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

It was the big-money TV transfer that cost even more than Chris Evans’ car collection (probably) – but were Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May worth the £160m that Amazon was reported to have spent on them?



No, said a senior executive at Netflix, who said the US on-demand service – and Amazon rival – had declined to sign up the former Top Gear presenters because “it wasn’t worth the money”.



Top Gear's Clarkson, Hammond and May sign Amazon deal Read more

It wasn’t long, however, before Netflix was executing something of a handbrake turn, saying it was not up to them whether Amazon had paid too much or not.



“We have past episodes of Top Gear, so we have a pretty good gauge of what audiences like,” the company’s chief product officer, Neil Hunt, told Digital Spy.



“Our buying decisions tend to be somewhat data-driven. We have a lot of data to get the deals we want. Clearly it wasn’t worth the money to make the deal.”

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has refused to be drawn on the exact figure it paid for three new series with the presenters, other than to say it was “very, very, very expensive” and that they are “worth a lot and they know it”.

Netflix later appeared to have second thoughts, or at least a previously unimagined moment of clarity, when it issued an addendum to Hunt’s remarks.



“There is an audience for everything and it is not up to us to judge if Amazon has paid too much or not,” it said.

Not quite reverse gear, then, but a gearbox crunching shift from fourth to first. And on that bombshell …