Netflix Chief Product Officer, Neil Hunt, says the Top Gear Trio wasn’t “worth the money to make the deal”.
The hosts of the popular motoring show, Top Gear, made headlines when they signed on with Amazon for a new show with an annual budget of $250 million. The Top Gear Trio was up for grabs when Jeremy Clarkson, the star of the show, reportedly punched a producer over a trivial issue after a day’s shooting. Far from throwing his career off the road, he is now one of UK’s most highly paid TV hosts at $15 million a year.
Netflix, the online streaming service, had been next in line to hire Clarkson but were out-bidded by Amazon. Neil Hunt, who has been with Netflix since 2002, emphasised that the company makes its decisions based on data, and Top Gear’s past distribution ratings did not justify the amount they had to pay to win over the Top Gear Team. He later clarified his somewhat disparaging remarks by adding, “There is an audience for everything and it is not up to us to judge if Amazon has paid too much or not.”
Amazon’s new show is an effort by the company to compete with Netflix in the online streaming world which Netflix practically owns with 65.55 million subscribers worldwide as of June 2015. The 36 episode show is expected to go online in 2016.