Breaking with more than 70 years of tradition, the Emmy Awards show will move to Amazon Prime Video from broadcast TV beginning next year.
The Television Academy on Tuesday announced a six-year deal with Amazon, which becomes the centerpiece of a push by the North Hollywood-based organization to broaden the reach and relevance of the TV industry’s annual awards gala.
Amazon has agreed to promote the show to its millions of international subscribers and also make it available for free to non-Prime Video customers. The move was expected.
“Our ambition here is to make this a global event that celebrates the biggest stars on television around the world,” Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in an interview. “This is a six-year deal, and we hope it’ll be much longer than that.”
Financial terms were not disclosed. The academy’s exclusive partnership with Amazon replaces the “wheel deal” — a rotation among ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, which have taken turns each year since the mid-1990s to host the event.
The churn has frustrated the nonprofit academy, which wanted a consistent partner to help bolster its relationships with advertisers, talent and viewers.
“We were essentially starting over every year with the creative process, with the production process and with building new relationships with sponsors,” Television Academy Chair Cris Abrego said in a separate interview. “There were a lot of challenges.”
The first Emmy Awards were handed out in 1949. Within a few years, NBC turned the Hollywood gala into a national telecast fitting for the small screen.
The hopscotch rotation was designed to level the playing field among fierce competitors when broadcast networks ruled the industry. But streaming platforms now rival, and in some cases, surpass broadcast TV as a go-to form of entertainment, particularly among the younger viewers that the TV Academy hopes to engage.
Broadcasters also lost interest in promoting the show as its ratings and their Emmy hauls declined amid the rise of HBO, cable channels AMC and FX, and streamers, including Netflix. This year, Apple TV+ won the most Emmys on the strength of its quirky series, “Widow’s Bay,” and other prestige programming.
The reversal of fortune prompted network executives to grouse that the Emmys had become a three-hour commercial for streaming services. Network shows were largely squeezed out and international shows and actors have received more acclaim — making the event less of a domestic affair.
The network rotation ended with last month’s telecast on NBC.
The show attracted nearly 7 million viewers — a 10% decline compared with the 2025 installment, which aired on CBS. The lower ratings were due, in part, because NBC staged the event on a mid-September Monday — instead of a more traditional Sunday — because it didn’t want to dislodge its most popular program, “Sunday Night Football.”
For Amazon, the arrangement continues the e-retailer’s expansion into live programming.
“The show still has a very large audience,” Hopkins said, adding that Amazon is confident it can boost the show’s profile — and the individual TV programs that it celebrates.
“We have an opportunity where many of the nominees and eventual winners will be part of the Prime Video family of subscriptions,” he said, noting that Amazon bundles other companies’ streaming services as add-ons to its own service.
The awards will offer additional marketing hooks.
“This gives us this unique opportunity to be celebrating the storytellers all year long,” Hopkins said.
Late last year, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced that it would shift the Oscars telecast to YouTube beginning in 2029 — a watershed moment after ABC has aired the Academy Awards for 50 years.
“Television is evolving,” Abrego said, adding that the Emmy Awards must evolve too.
For example, he said, the Emmy voting and award show calendar might be adjusted after 2027 so the event could occur earlier in the year, such as in May, when the shows feel fresher.
“We want to be in a position to reach as many people as possible,” Abrego said.
The post And the Emmy Awards go to Amazon Prime Video appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
