Top Gear
trio drive toweb
After months of headlines and
rumour, the trio of presenters
behind the weekly
Top Gear
programme, one of the BBC’s
top performing domestic and
international properties which is
sold to more than 200 countries,
have found a new home: Amazon.
on
Top Gear
, Jeremy Clarkson,
James May and Richard Hammond
pushed boundaries with their
action and language until
Clarkson was suspended in
March 2015 after allegations that
he had verbally and physically
abused one of the show’s
producers and eventually
dismissed by the BBC after a
high-level investigation. The
other two presenters, together
with the show’s exec producer
Andy Willman, announced they
were leaving. Speculation mounted
as to what would happen to the
programme. The BBC finally
announced that Radio 2 host and
car fanatic Chris Evans would
front the show when it returns to
the BBC later in 2015.
Top Gear’s
trio of presenters
remain hugely popular. At the end
of July came the announcement
that Amazon had secured a
three-season deal with Clarkson,
May and Hammond, plus executive
producer Andy Willman. The
programme will launch in early
2016 on Amazon Prime. It has
been suggested that the new
Amazon car show will be made
weekly and released at around
the same time on Sunday
evening when
Top Gear
has
hitherto been scheduled.
This is the first time that such
a strategy has been used by non-
broadcast platforms, creating
shared experiences and ‘water
cooler’ TV.
Top Gear
regularly
pulled in more than six million
viewers for its Sunday-evening
placing. If similar numbers want
to pull in an HD stream of the
programme as it’s released, can
both Amazon’s servers and BT –
that provides much of the UK’s
broadband infrastructure –
support uninterrupted viewing?
There is much work to be
done, as the start of the UK
football (soccer) season
demonstrated at the beginning
of August. BT Sport, the telco’s
subscription TV service, buckled
under the weight of demand
when Arsenal played Chelsea in
the Community Shield, with
significant numbers of people
unable to access coverage
online, via STBs or on the BT app.
Numbers are hard to come by
for platforms such as BT Sport,
Netflix or Amazon Prime.
According to UK trade paper
Broadcast
, the 2014 Community
Shield match was watched by an
average of 860,000 viewers,
down some two million on 2013
when it was carried on FTA
terrestrial broadcaster ITV.
Meanwhile the much talked
about
House of Cards
on Netflix
attracted 6.5% of US subscribers
(around 40m) over its first 30
days of availability, according to
Luth Research. That’s about
2.6m viewers – but importantly
that figure does not represent
concurrent streams served.
So the big question is: what
will happen to the UK’s web
when Clarkson, Hammond and
May appear on Amazon Prime
next year?
THE CHANNEL
|
ISSUE 2 2015
|
11
