According to Deadline, Amazon closed a six-year deal Tuesday making Prime Video the exclusive global home of the Emmy Awards, with the ceremony free to view every September, the pact reportedly worth north of $120 million over the term, and the end of the 30-year ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC rotation.
Read that again. Free. The Emmys, which rotated between four networks for three decades, now have one home, and the home is a streaming service's front porch, and the price of admission is zero.
The Television Academy press release calls this a "historic, multiyear deal" that will make the Emmys a "year-round cultural celebration." Amazon's Mike Hopkins calls it a "global event." The price tag is a fun puzzle: Deadline pegs it at $20 million to $25 million a year, and Variety says around $15 million. Neither number matches the other, and that is the first red flag. When both sides of a deal cannot agree on the number, one side is lying, or both sides are happy with the fiction.
Here is the thing about free. Nothing in marketing is free. The ceremony is free, and then what? Then a stranger walks into your living room and says the show that just won that statue is in your Prime bundle. Amazon bundles nearly every major streaming service under one subscription. The Emmy telecast is a commercial for the bundle. It is a four hour trailer that says the best TV is one click away, and you already paid for the click.
Television Academy chair Cris Abrego made free viewing a "non-negotiable" and praised Amazon for "understanding" it. Translation: Amazon agreed to let people watch without paying so they would remember the app is on their phone. Amazon already does this with its Fire phone concerts and its Black Friday NFL game. This is not charity. This is customer acquisition with a trophy case.
And the raise. The old wheel paid $8 million to $10 million a year for US rights, and now it is $20 million or more, or $15 million, pick a number. The Academy just watched its own product double in value, and the only buyer in the room was the company that does not make the product. You are not a partner in a "historic deal." You are the last remaining supplier of prestige to a company that could manufacture prestige in a warehouse and chose to buy yours instead, because yours comes with history it cannot fake.
Hopkins has a great line: "We stand up and clap at the Emmys when our partners win." That is the most honest thing a corporate executive has said on the record this week. Amazon does not win Emmys. It won 10 this year, 5 last year, 4 the year before, and it will keep losing to HBO and Apple and FX for the rest of time. So it did not buy a trophy. It bought a venue where it gets to stand up and clap, with the camera pointed at Amazon.
Best of all is the promise to "rethink the model" and "innovate." Translation: the show that used to take three and a half hours to tell you who won a statue will now take 90 minutes, because somebody at Amazon pulled the drop-off charts from a halftime show. The Academy wants to start "having these conversations in the next few days." Not in May, when it usually does. The next few days. The buyer moved in, and he is already holding a hammer to the furniture.
The wheel ended after 30 years. ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC passed the buck around for three decades, and now the buck has a delivery address.
YOUR TURN: If the Emmys are "free" but only inside a subscription you already pay for, is that actually free?
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