In a surprise move, former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond have signed a three-year deal with Amazon for a new motoring show. Earlier rumours suggested that the trio—who left the program earlier this year when Clarkson was let go as a consequence of punching a producer—would sign a deal with rival streaming service Netflix.
While the show being created for Amazon Prime—which requires a yearly subscription of £79 in the UK and $99 in the US—doesn't currently have a name, the company has confirmed that it will go into production shortly and launch in 2016. If you don't want Prime's free shipping, you can get Amazon Instant Video on its own with a (slightly) cheaper monthly subscription (£5.99 in the UK). The show will form part of Amazon Prime's original programming line-up, which currently includes the Steven Spielberg produced Extant, and Ridley Scott's The Man in the High Castle.
Landing the ex-Top Gear presenters, as well as ex-producer and creative force behind the show Andy Wilman, is quite the coup for Amazon. At its peak, Top Gear was the most watched factual program in the world, with a global audience of around 350 million people a year. Even if only a few of those people pay to join Prime, Amazon could be looking at making a very large sum of money.
Will you watch?
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday July 30 2015, @10:25PM
The trio's immature antics amuse me, and it revolves around cars!
Unfortunately, I'll be about an hour and a half behind the rest of the world since I'll need to wait for it to come out on torrent. As comments above have indicated, Amazon¹ isn't the most ethical business out there, and I already have Netflix. Hmm… piracy (yarr!) or giving Amazon a few bucks a month? Ethical dilemma!
¹ Today's fun fact: The Amazon River is named such because the Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana and his men were repeatedly attacked by the Cambeba Amazon tribe for invading their hunting grounds (mention on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]). They were driven deep into the rain forest by slavers during the 18th century, and nobody's heard from them since. The more you know!