Two years ago, Amazon (AMZN) started developing television content. In the past year, the company produced 24 pilots, which, according to Amazon Studios director Roy Price, is more than a typical broadcast network will prepare for primetime in a year.
Four of the five comedy and drama shows that Amazon debuted on Feb. 6 will be made into a series. They include Transparent, a dark comedy about an L.A. family with a father who is transitioning genders; Mozart in the Jungle, a comedy set amid the dramas of life in a New York orchestra; The After, a sci-fi drama from the creator of The X-Files;
and Bosch, a drama based on books by the detective novelist Michael Connelly. Alpha House, released last year, will get a second season.
Fortune spoke with Price on May 13 at Wired's BizCon in New York about how to make good TV and why it makes sense for Amazon.
Fortune: You are in Seattle. Where is your team?
Price: They're in L.A. If you want to make TV shows, you gotta go to L.A. I have MVP Gold status on Alaska [Airlines]. I'll move back to L.A. -- I'm from there -- in August.
You moved to Seattle nine years ago to join Amazon. What were you tasked with doing then?
I came to start the digital video store, at the time the DVD store. The question was, How are we going to approach the digital side of the video business? Those were the days when, I can remember one studio head saying to me, "You know, I can tell you one thing: No one is ever going to download one of our movies." And you know, eight months later you have a deal with them, but it was a period of transition.
Right now, everyone is jumping into professionally produced content. Yahoo announced some things this year. So did Glam Media. There's so much television -- is there a limit?
I suspect some people will fail outright, but a lot of people will find something that is distinctive and worth saying and has an audience. There's a lot of creativity out there. I think the question is whether you'll have enough people getting passionate about the show to make it work from a business model point of view. It depends on what your business model is -- subscription vs. advertising. I have no doubt we'll see a lot of experimentation and artistic success, and then we'll figure out the business side.
So it's a good time to be a creative in television?
Absolutely. There's great demand for high-quality work. And for original, distinctive ideas. The kind of idea that would have been super-challenging 10 years ago is now perhaps merely challenging to get going. Anything is challenging, but there's an appetite.
How does the business model for original programming work for Amazon?
Our business model is fairly straightforward because we have a subscription service so the goal of our program is simply to attract people to Amazon Prime. You've got a full subscription video service with movies and TV shows and then by the way, we'll give you free two-day shipping on the world's biggest Internet retailer for free.
How much does one of these series cost to produce?
We don't go into the budget per episode, but the cost of the series is the same as the cost of a series at any one of these places.
So when Netflix (NFLX) reveals it's spending more than $2.5 million per episode on House of Cards, you are spending about the same?
You know, I think House of Cards may be higher than average because they have [actor] Kevin Spacey and [director] David Fincher. I suspect that Orange is the New Black and The Good Wife and Bosch and The Americans are all in the same basket. Whatever premium cable broadcast budget is, that's a safe range for us.
How many shows does Amazon Studios currently have in production?
We have five children's shows and five adult shows. So we have 10 shows in production and then we have pilots. We just shot a pilot with Whit Stillman in Paris called The Cosmopolitans. That's a half hour. We also just shot a fabulous pilot called Hand of God starring Ron Perlman and Dana Delany and directed by Marc Forrester, who did World War Z and Monster's Ball. And we'll have more pilots after that.
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