As Seattle-based company rapidly expands TV and movies division, the man in driver’s seat makes it clear that Netflix is not the only game in town

When it comes to the rapidly expanding TV and movies division of Seattle-based retailer Amazon, you might expect the company that religiously studies customer order histories, when and how people buy, what they’re buying and a slew of other metrics, to bring that same zeal for data to its slate of original content.



After all, Amazon’s much bigger streaming competitor – Netflix – is famously data-driven, living and dying by what users are watching, how long they’re watching and using that to make guesses about what they want to see more of. As Amazon Studios chief Roy Price explains it, though, when it comes to Hollywood – data isn’t everything.

“Data is ... helpful,” Price says. “But it’s definitely possible to over or misuse it and apply it in an incorrect context and to ask the data to guide you in too granular a way,” Price says. “For example, some of the articles over time have said things like data has determined that if you’re in a romantic scene, the guy should wear a green shirt, or something like that. And you could say, well, you know – Breaking Bad was successful and Downton Abbey was successful, we have data on that, so we should combine those two shows! There are a lot of cockamamie roads you can go down.

“I think you have to take a little bit of a step back and say, what can we say about the biggest shows that made the biggest difference in television over a period of time?”

Price is the executive leading the pursuit of the content Amazon decides to chase, the talent it woos and how it goes about the task of convincing Hollywood and everyone else that Netflix isn’t the only new game in town.

Amazon already has scored with Transparent, its award-winning, rule-breaking TV show about an aging transgender woman. Next up is a big screen gamble with director Spike Lee’s timely and edgy drama Chi-raq – set amid a backdrop of gun violence in Chicago – which heads to theaters later this year.

It’s a reflection of Amazon’s deeper push into content, with the company now preparing to acquire and create original movies that it intends to have limited theatrical releases.

A traditionalist and an outsider at the helm

Price was practically born into the business. His grandfather was a co-creator of The Rockford Files, his father was Universal Pictures’ president in the 80s. Price brings a mix of the traditionalist as well as the outsider to Amazon, where he talks about the constant hunt for the kinds of stories other streaming services aren’t telling.

“A lot of the shows that made the biggest difference are, to some extent, rule-breaking shows,” he says. “They tend to have someone who’s super-talented who’s trying to do something new. And often the shows are non-intuitive. They’re not the thing you’d necessarily logically expect.

“If you come into work and have a really detailed, specific rubric for what the next successful, zeitgeist-y show will be and you’re locked into that particular model of a show, you’ll almost certainly be wrong. Because the next thing is going to be surprising and fun and new. That’s why it’s going to be the next thing.”

Finding the next new thing is one way of driving the retailer’s Amazon Prime subscription business. Members pay $99 a year for benefits that include free two-day shipping on their orders and access to Amazon streaming content like music, a library of TV shows and movies that Amazon has acquired, as well as the growing slate of Amazon original shows such as Transparent.

Next up are original Amazon films. The company brought on producer Ted Hope in January to lead its original movies unit, the first of which is Lee’s Chi-raq.

“It’s our first produced film, and it wrapped 167 days after Ted Hope and I had dinner with Spike at Sundance,” Price says. “Which may be a record.”

Amazon has never exhibited much reluctance when it comes to extending its corporate tentacles into a dizzying array of new markets – everything from groceries to cloud computing services – on the road to becoming a company with $89bn in annual revenue. A few days ago Amazon saw its market cap surge past Walmart’s.

Its clear that the company wants to be as big a player in media as it is in retail. Transparent scooped up 11 Emmy nominations and was the first online show to pick up a best series Golden Globe.

Focused on a transgender family patriarch played by Jeffrey Tambor, Transparent is coming back for a second season later this year and a third season next year.

And Amazon’s TV originals and big content deals keep coming. Amazon in recent days announced it’s inked a deal with the former stars of BBC car show “Top Gear” to stream a new car-focused show on Amazon.

Big deals keep coming

The deal is rumored to be worth $250m – the same price Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post – over 36 episodes, starting next year. The show will carry a different name, though, as the BBC still owns that.

On 7 August Amazon will debut pilots for two new shows – Casanova and Sneaky Pete. The former marks the small screen debut of Oscar-nominated director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose credits include Amelie, and it chronicles the life of the famed 18th-century playboy.

Sneaky Pete is a co-production with Sony Pictures Television. Central to its storyline is a con-man, played by Giovanni Ribisi, who takes the identity of his cellmate Pete after leaving prison.

“Sometimes these things come from reaching out to someone who we think is just great and talented and who we’d love to be in business with,” Price says. “Sometimes those things come to fruition immediately, because they have an idea and something they want to do and it lines up with us and boom, we’re off to the races. Other times it’s about forging a relationship and may take a year or two before anything actually becomes an opportunity.

“One way it doesn’t tend to happen is where we, like, have an idea for a show, like – oh, I think there should be a show about three people living in an apartment together or whatever it is. It tends to be creator-driven, and they’ve usually got ideas. If you look at our whole development slate, there are probably a couple of examples of every kind of origin story.”

Netflix is headed in the same direction. It’s bringing a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel to theaters this summer and has announced plans for a series of new movies with Adam Sandler.

The latter, it should be noted, proves how fraught and artistically risky these moves can be. Sandler is a hit on Netflix where his old movies are still very popular. But has that data led Netflix down the wrong path? The first film in the Sandler deal is due for release later this year and has already proved controversial, with word of Native American actors, offended by the film, walking off the set.

At a recent gathering of reporters at the Television Critics Association, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said the company still stood behind the Sandler deal, in spite of news like the poor initial reception to Pixels, Sandler’s latest film.

The new tech media companies competition for hits is getting ever fiercer. Hulu, which recently paid almost $180m for every episode of Seinfeld, is in the fray, as are others like Yahoo, which bought and revived NBC’s Community.

Bezos said in tandem with the company’s fourth quarter earnings release that the company “invested $1.3bn in Prime Instant Video” in 2014, a figure that includes expenses related to its original shows as well as licensing costs for content. Netflix, though, is still the biggest spender, with $3.2bn spent last year on content.

And Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Tony Wible said in a recent report Netflix could very well spend as much as $5bn in 2016.

Not all of Amazon’s originals, to be sure, have met with success. Its Silicon Valley-themed “Betas”, which captured none of the buzz of something like HBO’s Silicon Valley, got the axe after one season.

Amazon, though, is in this for the long haul – and it’s not worried about size or market share or anybody else’s budget for content, because it thinks the dynamics of the streaming market don’t automatically favor the biggest player.

“In the on-demand world, people actually have to demand the show, to proactively choose to watch your show,” Price says. “So it’s unlike, say, broadcast TV in the past, where they may have been watching a great show at eight, and the next show happens to come on and it’s good enough for you to leave the TV on until you get to Frasier at nine.

“There’s no such dynamic in this context. If you have a show everybody on earth thinks is pretty fair but no one thinks is pretty great – that show that may have had value in a previous era has zero value now. It creates a requirement that you have content that’s distinct and brings something special to the table.”