Emmys leave broadcast TV for Prime Video after 31 years, in historic six-year deal

The Emmy Awards are leaving broadcast television. The Television Academy and Amazon's Prime Video announced Tuesday that they have signed a six-year agreement making the streaming service the exclusive global home of the Primetime Emmy Awards starting with the 2027 ceremony, ending a 31-year arrangement that rotated the broadcast among the four major networks and taking the show off over-the-air TV for the first time since the awards began in 1949.

The deal, detailed in a joint announcement from the Television Academy, replaces what the industry has long called the "wheel deal": an annual rotation among ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC that most recently ran for eight years and concluded with the 78th Emmy Awards, broadcast on NBC and Peacock on September 14. Beginning in September 2027, the ceremony will stream live on Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories, and Amazon, in its own account of the agreement, stressed that it will remain free to watch, with no Prime subscription required.

The numbers

Neither company disclosed exact financial terms in the Academy's formal press release, and Television Academy chair Cris Abrego would not confirm a figure, telling Variety only that the new fee represents "definitely an increase" over what the broadcast networks had been paying. Trade outlets differed on the scale of that increase: Variety reported, citing sources, that Prime Video is paying a license fee of roughly $15 million a year for global rights, compared with the $8 million to $10 million the networks had been paying annually under the wheel deal for domestic rights alone. Deadline's own reporting put the figure higher, at more than $20 million a year, or north of $120 million over the full six-year term.

Whatever the precise figure, the shift marks a significant jump from a deal that had grown stale by industry standards. The 78th Emmys drew a fraction of the audience the ceremony once commanded on broadcast: when Fox briefly seized exclusive rights to the Emmys in 1987, ratings for the ceremony fell to 14.4 million viewers from 35.8 million the year before on NBC, a collapse that is still cited inside the Academy as a cautionary tale about moving the show to any single partner without a plan to rebuild its audience.

How the wheel deal came undone

The rotating arrangement among the big broadcast networks, in one form or another, has anchored the Emmys for decades. According to the Academy's own account of that history, the networks jointly agreed in the 1960s to share the telecast rather than let any one of them control it outright; Fox's exclusive run in the late 1980s and a brief ABC exclusive in the early 1990s were the exceptions that led the industry back to a shared "wheel." The most recent version of that deal, struck in 2018 for eight years, was never going to be renewed in its old form: at least one of the four networks, reported to be Fox, had already signaled it was stepping away before this year's ceremony aired.

That left the Academy weighing a menu of options, including keeping some version of the wheel with new partners and a since-discarded idea, championed publicly by Variety, of a simulcast across multiple networks and streamers at once. Abrego said the Academy had "a lot of choices," including unnamed independent suitors, but that Amazon's Mike Hopkins, who runs Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, made the strongest case for a single long-term partner. The move follows a broader, mixed-results migration of major awards shows off linear television that The Hollywood Reporter traced in its own coverage: Prime Video took over the Academy of Country Music Awards after it left CBS in 2021, the SAG-AFTRA Actor Awards moved from TNT and TBS to Netflix, and the Oscars are scheduled to move to YouTube beginning with the 2029 ceremony, after ABC airs the 2027 and 2028 shows. The Emmys will be the first of the so-called EGOT awards — Emmys, Grammys, Oscars and Tonys — to become exclusive to a streaming platform.

Who is affected

The clearest losers are ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, which lose a once-a-decade turn at hosting television's biggest night along with the advertising and promotional platform that came with it. The Academy itself also loses the "FXX deal" that had carried an edited version of the Creative Arts Emmys (recently rebranded as Emmy Nights 1 and 2), along with its prior international syndication arrangement with the U.K.'s Rainmaker Content; all of those rights, Abrego said, were deliberately timed to expire together so they could be folded into the single Prime Video pact.

Viewers, for their part, will need to find the ceremony on a streaming app rather than a broadcast channel for the first time in the show's history, though both companies stressed repeatedly that no payment or subscription will be required to watch. The deal also creates an opening for Prime Video to eventually absorb other Academy-adjacent properties: it may carry the Television Academy Hall of Fame and Television Academy Honors ceremonies, and Abrego said a parallel effort to merge the Television Academy with the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Daytime Emmys, is on track to close by the middle of 2027 — which could eventually bring NATAS's awards shows into the Prime Video fold as well, subject to separate licensing talks.

Reaction

Both sides framed the deal as a long-term bet rather than a one-off transaction. In the official announcement, Abrego and Hopkins each stressed the appeal of a single, consistent partner after three decades of starting over with a new network every year.

"Television has never been more global, and the Emmys should be a celebration that the world can share. Now with Prime Video, audiences in more than 200 countries will be able to experience the Emmys live, with no subscription required... Prime Video shares our deep respect for the history of the Emmys, and brings the investment, innovation, and scale to help us shape their next chapter."

That quote, from Abrego, was echoed by Hopkins, who called the arrangement "a fair deal" in a separate interview with Variety and said Amazon expects "this is a long-term partnership beyond six years." Hopkins also dismissed any notion that rival streamers would balk at an Emmys broadcast now owned by a competitor, noting that Prime Video Channels already resells access to services such as HBO Max, Apple TV and Peacock. "We want to have Netflix's biggest stars, and we want to have Disney's, and we want to have everybody else's as well," he said.

Abrego, who also serves as chief executive of Eva Longoria's Hyphenate Media Group, said the Academy's biggest internal worry was simply training viewers to look for the Emmys somewhere other than broadcast. "It is and was one of our concerns, and it's one of the things that Prime addressed immediately," he told Variety, adding that an early marketing presentation from Amazon had been "impressive."

What happens next

Planning for the 2027 telecast has not yet begun in earnest; the 78th Emmys took place barely three weeks before Tuesday's announcement. The ceremony is set to remain at the Peacock Theater at L.A. Live for at least one more year — a venue whose naming rights belong to a rival streamer, a wrinkle Hopkins said he was unconcerned about. Hopkins indicated Prime Video intends to promote the telecast heavily on its own platform, including during its Thursday Night Football broadcasts, while Abrego described ambitions to build a "road to the Emmys" out of existing Academy properties such as the Hall of Fame and Academy Honors, turning the ceremony into more of a year-round promotional franchise rather than a single September broadcast.

Hopkins said he does not intend to lengthen the show to accommodate the lack of a fixed broadcast clock. "I think a three-hour award show is plenty," he said, adding that any changes would focus on invigorating the format for new audiences rather than padding its runtime. The more consequential test, both executives acknowledged, will be whether an audience that has never known the Emmys as anything but a broadcast fixture follows the ceremony onto a streaming app — and whether Amazon's bet on the show's draw, pegged by various trade accounts at somewhere between roughly $90 million and more than $120 million over six years, pays off in the attention and subscriber activity the company is counting on.