Prime Video

Travis Kelce will host Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?, a spinoff of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, that will stream on Prime Video. Kelce plays tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. He’s been in eight Pro Bowls and his girlfriend is Taylor Swift. MGM Alternative produces the show and 20 episodes have been ordered.

Amazon and the BBC are teaming to revive the Emmy- and BAFTA-winning thriller The Night Manager, eight years after its initial run. Tom Hiddleston will reprise his role in the show, which scored a two-season order from the BBC and Amazon’s Prime Video streaming platform. Series creator David Farr is also set to return as writer. Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, who starred in the first season, will also be executive producers.

Prime Video has handed a series order to reality competition series Beast Games from YouTube personality MrBeast (né Jimmy Donaldson) and Amazon MGM Studios, with a $5 million grand prize – the biggest payout in TV history.

The tech giant’s Prime Video streaming platform has named Patton Oswalt as host of The 1% Club, an adaptation of a hit British quiz show. In a novel arrangement, Fox will air the show in a second window, eight days after episodes debut on Prime Video. It marks a rare occasion when a broadcast network has taken the second run of a streaming series that’s not part of its own corporate family (e.g., Disney+ and ABC).

While other media companies have been paring back content spending, Amazon shelled out more than $2 billion more in 2023 for TV shows, movies and music than it did a year earlier. Amazon’s total video and music expense last year was $18.9 billion, representing a 14% increase from $16.6 billion in 2022, according to the company’s 10-K annual report.

Prime Video will become the primary partner through which consumers can purchase streaming services from the largest U.S. operator of regional sports networks under a framework for a reorganization plan set to allow the company to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

“It’s important that we prioritize our investments for the long-term success of our business,” division leader Mike Hopkins writes in an internal memo.

Amazon announced in September that ads were on the way for Prime Video‘s entertainment content. Now we have a date. On Jan. 29, 2024, commercials will be introduced to series and movies airing on the service in the U.S., UK, Germany and Canada. That will be followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year. The move was announced in a letter sent to subscribers that described the addition of what was termed “limited advertisements” to allow the service “to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.”

Prime Video executives aren’t prepared to guarantee a ratings bonanza with the first NFL game on Black Friday. They mainly hope it succeeds in seeding a new annual pop culture event on the day after Thanksgiving. “We’ll see how it goes, but our expectation and the NFL’s expectation is that this becomes an annual tradition,” said Jay Marine, VP of Prime Video and global head of sports, during a media conference call.

The new distribution will provide NWSL fans viewing across linear and streaming each weekend. The four-year partnerships total a 40x multiple from NWSL’s previous deal.

At league meetings next week, the NFL will discuss ways to improve the matchup quality for Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football schedule, after last season’s Thursday-night slate became noticeably bereft of competitive games.

Amazon announced Tuesday that the Black Friday game on Nov. 24 will be available for all fans to stream for free. The 2023 season will mark the first time the league has scheduled a game for the day after Thanksgiving. The teams for the 3 p.m. ET game will be announced later.

Amazon, which last August paid $1 billion for 10-year rights to stream 15 regular season and one pre-season Thursday Night Football games on Prime Video — the NFL’s first exclusive national broadcast package with a digital streaming service — is now offering advertisers refunds or alternate ad inventory after audiences for the just-completed season fell about 25% of Amazon’s preseason estimates, one source says.

Prime Video wants to be a sports content juggernaut. The streamer already has exclusive rights to NFL Thursday Night Football, and on Thursday announced the launch of Sports Talk, a new 12-hour original sports-talk programming block.

LeBron James is partnering with Prime Video to bring a special version of his show Uninterrupted The Shop to Thursday Night Football. James, Maverick Carter, Paul Rivera and special guests will join TNF live from The Shop as an alternate stream offering, starting with the Tennessee Titans and Green Bay Packers game Nov. 17. TNF in The Shop will be an unmatched, watch-party-style experience, according to Prime Video.

The second week of Prime Video’s exclusive Thursday Night Football streams drew an average of 11.03 million viewers for a fairly low-wattage game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns. Nielsen and Amazon said the game marked a 39% improvement over last year’s Week 3 game, which was on on NFL Network. The 2021 game pulled in 7.96 million viewers across the cable channel, local-market stations and out-of-home sites. Nielsen’s tally for this year’s Thursday games rolls together the local stations, out-of-home and Amazon’s Twitch livestream platform.

Prime Video’s regular-season debut as the exclusive home of the primetime package comes on Sept. 15 when Kansas City hosts the Los Angeles Chargers. Kaylee Hartung has been hired by Amazon as the sideline reporter while Andrew Whitworth and Aqib Talib have signed on as contributors for pregame, halftime and postgame coverage.

Ukonwa Ojo, who arrived at Amazon Studios and Prime Video close to two years ago as their chief marketing officer, is leaving. In a memo to staff about Ojo’s departure, Mike Hopkins, SVP Prime Video & Amazon Studios, wrote that he’s “reaching out to senior marketing team members in the coming days on how we best move forward.”

NFL cornerback Richard Sherman will serve as an analyst on Thursday Night Football, Prime Video announced Tuesday. Sherman joins an on-air talent roster that includes legendary play-by-play announcer Al Michaels, five-time Emmy-winning analyst Kirk Herbstreit and Pro Football Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez. Alongside Gonzalez, Sherman will contribute to coverage of each TNF game, as well as pregame, halftime and postgame segments.

Prime Video‘s exclusive hosting of Thursday Night Football will kick off Sept. 15 with Justin Herbert and the Los Angeles Chargers visiting their AFC West rivals, Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.

The Wheel of Time channeled itself a primo spot on Nielsen’s U.S. streaming chart ranking the Top 10 original series for the week of Nov. 15. With just a few days of eligibility for this measuring period, Prime Video’s already-renewed fantasy saga adaptation (which bowed on Nov. 19) debuted at No. 1 with 1.6 billion minutes viewed across its first three episodes — making it the second most-watched Prime Video original since Hunters (in February 2020).

After more than two years, the Prime Video comedy series will be back for Season 4 on Friday, Feb. 18, the streaming service announced Tuesday. For the first time in Mrs. Maisel‘s run, episodes will drop on a weekly basis instead of a binge-release rollout, with two new installments becoming available every Friday for four consecutive weeks.

Amazon is looking to add 24/7 live programming to its Prime Video service, according to multiple job listings posted over the past several weeks. The new channels could include live news, music and sports as well as scheduled movies and TV show showings.

The league is finally dropping a requirement that viewers sign in with a cable or satellite subscription, in hopes of expanding its online audience at a time when TV ratings are declining . Though there are restrictions — no free streaming on smart TVs, for instance — the move marks a significant departure for sports.