LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Emmy Awards are moving to Prime Video starting in 2027 in a six-year deal struck between Amazon and the Television Academy that ends a seven-decade run of broadcast networks airing the ceremony honoring the best in TV.
The agreement announced Tuesday means a shift to the streaming services that have come to utterly dominate the prestige categories at the Emmys.
The show has aired on one of the four broadcast networks every year since 1955. NBC was first to air it nationally, and was the last to host it last month. For the past three decades it has been in a yearly rotation between ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in what was known as the “Wheel Deal.”
Having a single, long-term home starting with next September’s 79th Primetime Emmy Awards may be the biggest change.
“Continuity is a big part of what we’re looking for because the rotating part of it basically meant in many ways that we were starting over every year,” Cris Abrego, chairman of the Television Academy, told The Associated Press. “With one partner over six years, we can really learn together and build from year to year together.”
The Emmys will continue to air free of charge as it always has, a demand the Academy made from the start to its suitors. No Prime Video subscription will be required to watch.
The move echoes the Oscars’ deal announced in December sending them to YouTube and ending their own, just-as-long relationship with broadcast networks. But unlike that agreement, announced in 2025 and starting in 2029, this one is effective immediately.
“We’re on the clock, we gotta get rolling,” Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, told the AP.
Nearly all awards shows have seen steep drops in viewership in a more segmented culture, and the Emmys have consistently lagged behind the Oscars, Grammys and Golden Globes even as the acclaim for the shows they honor has grown. At its peak, the show drew more than 20 million viewers. The figure now hovers around 7 million.
Both the Academy and Amazon said Prime Video might be in a position to change that as a place where so much of the Emmys programming can be viewed, whether it’s a Prime production or a streaming partnership. The biggest winners at the last two Emmys, “Widow’s Bay” and “The Studio,” can both be watched on Prime Video through its partnership with Apple TV.
“I think we’re going to be able to increase the viewership over time on this show, age it down, actually bring in a younger audience, which I think is a catalyst to growing,” Hopkins said. “We will have the opportunity throughout the year to be promoting Emmy nominees to our customers as a way of saying ‘Hey, watch these shows, but also watch the Emmys.’”
Abrego said this approach, and Prime Video’s role as a television hub, was a major consideration in taking the show there.
“They really support all television,” he said. “We want reach, we want access, and we felt Amazon was in line with that.”
And while Abrego acknowledged the significance of the move to streaming and its implications, he said the content is far more important than how it’s delivered.
“The Academy has never defined television by how it reaches your screen or even which screen it reaches,” he said. “The goal is to consistently want to recognize excellence wherever it comes from.”
Live events on Amazon have not been a novelty for a long time. It’s been nearly a decade since it first aired an NFL game and many other major sports and other events have followed.
“We look at our service as something that’s a hybrid between live and on-demand, and we’ve made live a real priority,” Hopkins said.
Football has always been a problem for the Emmys. Its time slots on Sunday or Monday nights in September nearly always lead to a clash with the rating monolith of the NFL.
This year’s show was trounced by the first Monday Night Football game of the year between the Kansas City Chiefs and Denver Broncos on ESPN.
The ceremony will stay in September in 2027, but that doesn’t mean it is set for the run of the agreement.
“We had conversations with Amazon, if we wanted to change that date moving forward with time, we could explore it and we would be open to it,” Abrego said, acknowledging that it would have repercussions with deadlines and voting.