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Business News/ Opinion / With new show, Amazon makes bid for living room and beyond
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With new show, Amazon makes bid for living room and beyond

Big Internet players like Netflix, Amazon stepping up efforts in original programming, competing for viewers in world of streaming

Alpha House, which will have its premiere 15 November, is the first attempt at original programming by Amazon.com. Photo: BloombergPremium
Alpha House, which will have its premiere 15 November, is the first attempt at original programming by Amazon.com. Photo: Bloomberg

Not long ago, I was on the set of a show about politics, Washington and a senator gone rogue. The set had all the trappings of a big-time television production, but it will be delivered not by broadcast or cable, but over the Internet by a technology company that has not historically been in the business of original productions.

No, this was not House of Cards, the Netflix drama that received a lot of attention and an Emmy for best director.

House of Cards was actually being filmed about 200 miles to the south, in Baltimore. I was in Queens watching a comedy called Alpha House, written by Garry Trudeau, the creator of the comic Doonesbury, that pivots around the substantial acting and physical presence of John Goodman.

Alpha House, which will have its premiere 15 November, is the first attempt at original programming by Amazon.com. It’s a small bet by a very big company, but one that could create additional momentum for the further disruption of what we still call television but is quickly becoming something more complicated and interesting.

The programme is loosely based on a house that served as a crash pad for four Democrats in Washington, including Sens. Charles E. Schumer and Richard J. Durbin, and Reps. George Miller and Bill Delahunt. Except on Alpha House, the four men are all senators, all Republicans and all flawed in ways that give the comedy impulse plenty of room to roam.

Goodman’s character, Gil John Biggs, is a revered former basketball coach of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels and now a Republican senator from that state who is confronting a Tea Party challenge from Digger Mancusi, the current Duke coach.

In a scene filmed last month, Biggs is bathing in post-gaffe regret—we will avoid spoilers here—trying to deal with a video gone “virile," as he describes it. When an aide tells him there are in fact six deeply embarrassing videos making the rounds on the Internet, Biggs’ face becomes a portrait of hatred for this modern age.

He swears lustily, and then moans, “It’s like the Clemson game all over again!" After his wife and aide suggest that he go on a morning show as part of an apology tour, he swears again, and says, “I don’t need to humanize myself! I’m plenty human."

Washington’s feet of clay are all the rage on television right now—there’s Scandal on ABC, Veep on HBO and, of course, House of Cards—but another trend is afoot. Big Internet players like Netflix and Amazon are stepping up their efforts in original programming, competing for viewers in the world of streaming.

In the instances of House of Cards and Alpha House, they are even presenting the same general subject matter, albeit taking different approaches—House of Cards is a whodunit-to-whom drama while Alpha House is full-contact comedy.

The reasons are obvious, even if the economics are a little opaque. Both companies want a substantial footprint on your various devices, and to be part of the television ecosystem, they decided they had to make “television". In doing so, they become less of a hostage to the traditional content providers while putting consumers on notice that interesting television, if that is what it is, can come from all kinds of places.

That lesson had to be learned by content creators as well. Alpha House had been percolating for a while with Trudeau, who wrote Tanner 88 for HBO. He and Jonathan Alter, the journalist and author, have been taking trips to the New Hampshire primary for the last 20 years, and the concept came up again in 2012. Alter took the idea to Amazon.

“I had no interest in making YouTube videos and didn’t really understand that Amazon was getting into full-fledged productions," Trudeau said. “It soon became clear that they were willing to put significant resources into original content."

The business models—and the marquee programmes—of Netflix and Amazon bear surface similarities, but different agendas are at work. Netflix is a pure-play entertainment company that uses data, licensed content and streaming distribution to build an audience of subscribers—similar to cable, but without the actual cable. House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black and other original shows help the company keep subscribers happy and earn new ones. In that sense, the programming, or the play, is the thing.

For Amazon, programming is an add-on, a benefit of being a member of Amazon Prime.

In addition to free two-day shipping, the company’s 11 million Prime members have access to Amazon Prime Instant Video, with more than 40,000 movies and television episodes, and beginning next week, Alpha House. The first three episodes will be available 15 November, free to all Amazon customers, and additional episodes will then be available to subscribers of Amazon Prime every week.

Lest you think Amazon is being generous, it is important to note that Prime members reportedly spend 150% more on the site after joining. You get the drift: Come for Alpha House and stick around to buy a big new flat-screen to watch it on.

It’s not cheap or easy to make content. Variety estimated that the company is spending $1 million to $2 million an episode on original programming and will not reap immediate profits, but Amazon is playing a longer game. It’s part of the so-called flywheel effect, a business theory that suggests that adding small features to a core business—in Amazon’s case, selling millions of products online—makes the wheel spin faster, helping you add customers and achieve efficiencies through increased scale.

The strategy—programming as a throw-in bonus for consumers—has the potential to complicate the industry enormously, but Amazon’s approach is unorthodox as well. The big networks engage in a hugely inefficient pilot process—by the time executives finish choosing the handful of programmes that will be broadcast, the aftermath looks like an episode of Walking Dead, with very expensive carcasses littering the landscape.

Amazon instead used its reach—it has 215 million customers worldwide—to create a vast focus group. In the spring, the company made 14 pilots available for viewing and rating. “Alpha House" ended up highly rated enough for a crowd-sourced green light, along with Betas, a comedy about a start-up in Silicon Valley. (Insert your own joke here about the first two original series being named Alpha and Beta.)

“The data part of it is basically a black box to us," Trudeau said.

“I was flabbergasted by their mode of decision-making, that we were going to put something out there as troll bait, but they generated the numbers and have entrusted me with what is equivalent to a midsized corporation, so I guess the kingdom of Big Data came back positive."

It was more than that, said Roy Price, director of Amazon Studios.

“We try to put together some of the things from traditional TV and Amazon’s tradition of listening to customers, so in that sense, it is a hybrid," he said. “With Alpha House, a lot of people responded to the cast and Garry’s sense of humour. It’s a comedy that brings insights into a world people are familiar with, and it clearly resonated with Amazon Prime customers."

Alter said it represented a shift of sorts.

“In the end, it’s sort of refreshing, taking some of the power away from the suits and letting people help decide," he said.

Still, it’s more or less the same to the people in front of the camera, including Goodman, who broke through as the sitcom husband on Roseanne.

“This one has a different distribution platform, but this," he said, gesturing around to the crew, the equipment and the sets, “is a TV show. A good one, we hope".

©2013/The New York Times

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Published: 04 Nov 2013, 10:36 PM IST
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