Amazon’s “The Grand Tour” Car Show Breaks Streaming Records

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 5:32PM EST · Published Nov 22, 6:32AM EST

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Over 16 million cars and light trucks will be sold in the U.S. this year, and millions more in the U.K. and Germany. Tapping into that market, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) paid an extraordinary sum to launch an auto TV show, “The Grand Tour,” for its Prime members. Based on early results, the investment appears to have paid off. However, in keeping with tradition, Amazon did not offer exact numbers.

The company reported:

The debut episode of the highly anticipated new Amazon Original Series, The Grand Tour, has become the biggest show premiere ever on Amazon Prime Video, with millions of Prime members streaming the first episode in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Austria and Japan over the opening weekend. Viewership has even exceeded that of the previous number one show, The Man in The High Castle. Additionally, the day The Grand Tour debuted, total new Prime membership sign-ups exceeded all previous days with the exception of Amazon’s renowned Prime Day.

The Grand Tour is also receiving unprecedented customer and critical acclaim with the show being the top rated TV show or movie on IMDb, the world’s most popular source of movie and TV data, with an overall rating of 9.6 and over 10,000 votes. The show is rated 4.9 out of 5 stars by more than 15,000 customers on Amazon, and currently has a score of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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Business Insider reports that Amazon paid $250 million for the program. The hosts of the show previously appeared in “Top Gear,” which aired on the BBC.

The Grand Tour represents two risks for Amazon. One is that it ups the original programming price wars, which reflect investments by Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), movie studios, and cable channels. When it released earnings, Netflix management said it would spend $6 billion on programs in the next year. It is not certain that these investments are better than content licensed from other sources.

The other risk is that the market is saturated. The media is crowded with car magazines, car shows, car ads, and car races. Gaining attention is hard, to say the least.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.