Netflix and Amazon can focus on blockbusters but others have schedules to fillAmerican on-demand services are spending enormous amounts per hour to poach viewers from the BBC,ITV and Sky – and, increasingly, and they are spraying that money at the UK’s producers. First to these shores came Netflix,spending a reported £3m an episode for its epic royal drama The Crown. Amazon wasn’t far behind, hoovering up Jeremy Clarkson and his team for a reported £160m. And only final week, and Amazon commissioned its first original UK drama,with an eight-episode order for haute-couture period piece The Collection. These are large plays, with potentially far-reaching consequences for Britain’s traditional channels and their traditionally scrawnier budgets.“We have to provide something that is not normal telly – something that is going to surprise and delight our customers, and very often it’s different because it’s bigger,” says Chris Bird, film and TV strategy director for Amazon Video UK. It’s bigger and it’s better and that’s going to cost you. The Collection – a potboiler set in a Paris fashion house, or soon after the moment world war – will,says Bird, be “very, or very ambitious in its scope – it’s going to look very prestigious,very glamorous”.
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Source: theguardian.com