Amazon’s
The purchase of MGM allows Amazon’s streaming service - Amazon Prime Video - to utilise the products the studio has created to develop content around worlds such as Rocky and RoboCop.
Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios said on the purchase, “The real financial value behind this deal is the treasure trove of (intellectual property) in the deep catalogue that we plan to reimagine and develop together with MGM’s talented team. It’s very exciting and provides so many opportunities for high-quality storytelling,”
Outside of the more mainstream Hollywood intellectual property (IP), Amazon will also inherit cable channel Epix, responsible for scripted shows Fargo and Vikings, and non-scripted products such as The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Shark Tank to add a further offering to Amazon Prime.
The landscape
The blockbuster move comes after the recent $43 billion merger of AT&T and Discovery
The Amazon-MGM acquisition marks the second-largest deal in Amazon’s purchasing history only behind the $13.7 billion 2017 buy of Whole Foods
Amazon has also delved into live sports with a multi-year deal with the National Football League, said to be costing $1 billion per year, and with the U.K.’s Premier League
In April Amazon delivered another record quarterly profit - its fourth in a row - and now boasts 200 million Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide. The acquisition of the James Bond franchise gives the company access to exploit a film brand that has drawn in more than $7 billion at the box office alone, according to MGM.
It’s starting to feel very much like there is no major industry that Amazon doesn’t fully compete in. Space exploration, streaming, cloud computing, self-driving cars, online shopping, artificial intelligence, robotics, publishing, gaming food, the list seems endless, and with Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ deep pockets no industry has a buy-in too high for the multinational company in the race to control the future.