Amazon.com Inc.’s top television shows drew more than 5 million people worldwide to its Prime shopping club by early 2017, according to company documents, revealing for the first time how the retailer’s bet on original video is paying off.

The documents also show that Amazon’s U.S. audience for all video programming on Prime, including films and TV shows it licenses from other companies, was about 26 million customers.

Amazon has never released figures for its total audience.

The internal documents compare metrics that have never been reported for 19 shows exclusive to Amazon: their cost, their viewership and the number of people they helped lure to Prime.

Known as Prime Originals, the shows account for as much as a quarter of what analysts estimate to be total Prime sign-ups from late 2014 to early 2017, the period covered by the documents.

Viewers to shoppers

Core to Amazon’s strategy is the use of video to convert viewers into shoppers. Fans access Amazon’s lineup by joining Prime, a club that includes two-day package delivery and other perks, for an annual fee.

The company declined to comment on the documents seen by Reuters. But Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has been upfront about the company’s use of entertainment to drive merchandise sales.

The world’s biggest online retailer launched Amazon Studios in 2010 to develop original programs that have since grabbed awards and Hollywood buzz.

“When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” Bezos said at a 2016 technology conference near Los Angeles. He said film and TV customers renew their subscriptions “at higher rates, and they convert from free trials at higher rates” than members who do not stream videos on Prime.

​$5 billion in video

Video has grown to be one of Amazon’s biggest expenditures at $5 billion per year for original and licensed content, two people familiar with the matter said. The company has never disclosed how many subscribers it won as a result, making it hard for investors to evaluate its programming decisions.

The internal documents show what Amazon considers to be the financial logic of its strategy, and why the company is now making more commercial projects in addition to shows aimed at winning awards, the people said.

For example, the first season of the popular drama The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history depicting Germany as the victor of World War II, had 8 million U.S. viewers as of early 2017, according to the documents. The program cost $72 million in production and marketing and attracted 1.15 million new subscribers worldwide based on Amazon’s accounting, the documents showed.

Amazon calculated that the show drew new Prime members at an average cost of $63 per subscriber.

That is far less than the $99 that subscribers pay in the United States for Prime; the company charges similar fees abroad. Prime members also buy more goods from Amazon than non-members, Bezos has said, further boosting profit.

Amazon’s secret math

Precisely how Amazon determines a customer’s motivation for joining its Prime club is not clear from the documents viewed by Reuters.

But a person familiar with its strategy said the company credits a specific show for luring someone to start or extend a Prime subscription if that program is the first one a customer streams after signing up. That metric, referenced throughout the documents, is known as a “first stream.”

The company then calculates how expensive the viewer was to acquire by dividing the show’s costs by the number of first streams it had. The lower that figure, the better.

The internal documents do not show how long subscribers stayed with Prime, nor do they indicate how much shopping they do on Amazon. The company reviews other metrics for its programs as well. Consequently, the documents do not provide enough information to determine the overall profitability of Amazon’s Hollywood endeavor.

Still, the numbers indicate that broad-interest shows can lure Prime members cheaply by Amazon’s calculations. One big winner was the motoring series The Grand Tour, which stars the former presenters of BBC’s Top Gear. The show had more than 1.5 million first streams from Prime members worldwide, at a cost of $49 per subscriber in its first season.

The documents seen by Reuters reflect Prime subscribers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and Japan, where Amazon’s programs were available before Prime Video rolled out globally in December 2016.

Analysts estimate that 75 million or more customers have Prime subscriptions worldwide, including about half of all households in the United States.

Bigger bets

About 26 million U.S. Prime members watched television and movies on Amazon as of early 2017. Reuters calculated this number from the documents, which showed how many viewers a TV series had as a percentage of total Prime Video customers.

Rival Netflix Inc had twice that many U.S. subscribers in the first quarter of last year. It does not disclose how many were active viewers.

For years, Amazon Studios aimed to win credibility in Hollywood with sophisticated shows beloved by critics. Its marquee series Transparent, about a transgender father and his family, won eight Primetime Emmy Awards and created the buzz Amazon wanted to attract top producers and actors.

Yet Transparent lagged Amazon’s top shows in viewership.

Its first season drew a U.S. audience half as large as that of The Man in the High Castle, and it fell to 1.3 million viewers for its third season, according to the documents.

Similarly, Good Girls Revolt, a critically acclaimed show about gender inequality in a New York newsroom, had total U.S. viewership of 1.6 million but cost $81 million, with only 52,000 first streams worldwide by Prime members.

The program’s cost per new customer was about $1,560, according to the documents. Amazon canceled it after one season.

Amazon is now working on more commercial dramas and spin-offs with appeal outside the United States, where Prime membership has far more room to grow, people familiar with the matter said.

The effort to broaden Amazon’s lineup, long in the works, will be in the hands of Jennifer Salke, NBC Entertainment’s president whom Amazon hired last month as its studio chief.

Amazon’s Bezos has wanted a drama to rival HBO’s global hit Game of Thrones, according to the people.

In November, Amazon announced it will make a prequel to the fantasy hit The Lord of the Rings. The company had offered $250 million for the rights alone; production and marketing could raise costs to $500 million or more for two seasons, one of the people said.

At half a billion dollars, the prequel would cost triple what Amazon paid for The Man in the High Castle seasons one and two, the documents show. That means it would need to draw three times the number of Prime members as The Man in the High Castle for an equal payoff.
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The estate of “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee has filed suit over an upcoming Broadway adaptation of the novel, arguing that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s script wrongly alters Atticus Finch and other characters from the book.

The suit, which includes a copy of a contract signed by Lee and dated about eight months before her death in February 2016, contends Sorkin’s script violates the agreement by portraying Finch, the noble attorney who represents a black man wrongly accused of rape in “Mockingbird,” as someone else in the play.

Filed against the theater company of New York producer Scott Rudin, the complaint cites an interview with the online publication Vulture in which Sorkin was quoted as saying the small-town lawyer would evolve from a racist apologist at the start of the show to become “Atticus Finch by the end of the play.”

Such a change during a play could fit with the character evolution shown between the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Mockingbird” and Lee’s first draft of the novel, finally released in 2015 as “Go Set a Watchman.”

But the lawsuit contends the script would violate the contact by changing Finch and other characters and adding still more people who aren’t in the novel. It asks a judge to enforce a section of the agreement that states the play won’t “depart in any manner from the spirit of the Novel nor alter its characters.”

‘A faithful adaptation’

A firm that represents Rudin’s company, Rudinplay Inc., said Sorkin’s script “is a faithful adaptation of a singular novel which has been crafted well within the constraints of the signed agreement” between the producers and Lee.

The statement also took a jab at the “history of litigious behavior” of Lee’s estate, overseen by attorney Tonja Carter of Lee’s south Alabama hometown of Monroeville.

“This is, unfortunately, simply another such lawsuit, the latest of many, and we believe that it is without merit,” said the statement. “While we hope this gets resolved, if it does not, the suit will be vigorously defended.”

The play is scheduled to open in New York in December.

The suit names as its plaintiff Carter, who represented Lee during the final years of the author’s life. Carter handled Lee’s will and is listed in the lawsuit as the personal representative of Lee’s estate.

Estate’s concerns

Rudinplay paid Lee $100,000 after she approved Sorkin as the screenwriter in November 2015, the suit said. Carter first saw a draft of the play in September, according to the lawsuit, and she later spoke with Rudin by phone to express numerous concerns about Sorkin’s script.

“Mr. Rudin assured Ms. Carter that he wanted to do the Play right and that he would make sure that the Estate would be satisfied with the final product,” the suit said.

The two talked again in February about the script, the suit said, adding: “At times, the conversation was heated.” Carter sued after Rudin’s attorney wrote earlier this month saying extensive changes to the script weren’t possible, the suit said.

Sorkin has won multiple Emmys for his work on the drama series “The West Wing,” and he won an Academy Award for his screenplay of “The Social Network” in 2011.

Rudin’s credits include “Lady Bird,” which was nominated for an Academy Award as best motion picture this year, and “Fences,” which was a 2017 nominee. He won a best picture Oscar for “No Country for Old Men” in 2008.
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Wielding a silver shovel instead of a lightsaber, “Star Wars” creator George Lucas joined a handful of elected officials Wednesday in breaking ground on a billion-dollar museum dedicated to the art of visual storytelling. 

Construction of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a dream of the 73-year-old writer-director for more than a decade, is expected to be completed by the end of 2021. 

Trucks rumbled by the museum site near downtown Los Angeles as Lucas, dressed casually in a white- and blue-checkered shirt, jeans and tennis shoes, thanked more than 100 well-wishers. Among them was his collaborator and longtime friend, director Steven Spielberg. 

“I think it’s important to have a museum that, as I was joking and saying, supports all the orphan arts that nobody else wants to see, but that everybody loves,” Lucas said, describing the project. 

His museum’s mission, he added, will be to explain the myths, legends, stories and portraits of people that shape societies and bring them together as one. The art will range from paintings and digital works to comic strips and, yes, movies like “Star Wars.”

“To my feeling, popular art is an insight into a society and what they aspire to, what they really want, what they really are,” Lucas said before grabbing a shovel and joining several local officials in turning over some dirt. 

At times, the groundbreaking resembled a movie premiere minus the red carpet, with television cameras and photographers capturing the moment. Lucas called on Spielberg to join him on the mound of dirt, directing his friend to give a thumbs-up to the cameras. 

“It’s a great location,” Spielberg told him as they headed to a private reception. Lucas pointed out the blocks-long museum site that until recently was a parking lot behind the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum where the 1932 and 1984 Olympics took place. 

It will be transformed into a multistory museum resembling Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon spacecraft that appears to hover over an area surrounded by 11 acres of green space. The museum itself will contain more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space, underground parking, a restaurant, movie theaters and other amenities. Numerous programs are being planned for children from surrounding schools. 

Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, are picking up the cost, which museum officials expect will exceed $1 billion for construction and its operating endowment. That will make it the largest public gift ever given to a municipality, local officials say. 

The museum will be in Exposition Park, across the street from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the California Science Center and the California African American Museum and on the edge of the University of Southern California, where Lucas studied in the 1960s.

Although Lucas attended college nearby, the site was the third choice for the museum. Lucas and his wife couldn’t reach an agreement with the director’s hometown of San Francisco or his wife’s hometown of Chicago. 

The museum’s wide-ranging collection will include paintings by Norman Rockwell, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, comic strips by “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz and underground artist Robert Crumb, animation from films such as “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and special effects from films such as “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” 

Classic films represented will range from 1927’s futuristic masterpiece “Metropolis” and Orson Welles’ groundbreaking 1941 film “Citizen Kane” to the Lucas-Spielberg collaborations on the “Indiana Jones” movies. 

And, of course, The Force will be strong at the museum. People will find everything from Luke Skywalker’s first lightsaber to Darth Vader’s helmet. Storyboards laying out the tale that Lucas created and that lives on in new film iterations also will be on display, along with stormtrooper uniforms and other set pieces. 

Lucas, who has said mythologist Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” helped inspire his “Star Wars” stories, remarked Wednesday that he believes that without such tales, people don’t come together to gain common cultural understanding. 

“Whether it’s a cave painting or whether it’s Apollo as a statue or whether it’s the Sistine Chapel, whether it’s Napoleon on a horse, whatever it is, that’s what we aspire to,” he said. 

And that’s a message, he added, that he hopes museum visitors will come away with. 
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A producer of hit royal drama The Crown says Claire Foy, who played the central role of Queen Elizabeth II, was paid less than her on-screen husband.

The Netflix series traces Elizabeth’s journey from princess to queen, beginning in the 1950s.

Trade publication Variety quoted producer Suzanne Mackie as confirming Foy was paid less than Matt Smith, who played Prince Philip in two seasons of the series. She made the reported comment at an industry event in Jerusalem.

She said this was because Smith was better-known after starring in the sci-fi series Doctor Who. Mackie said the gap would be closed with the forthcoming third series, saying “going forward, no one gets paid more than the queen.”

Foy’s agent did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Neither Foy nor Smith will appear in the third series, which will star Olivia Colman as the middle-aged monarch.

The gender pay gap has become a big issue in Hollywood after revelations that many female stars were paid less than their male counterparts.
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Well-traveled and much experienced as a soccer coach, Hector Cuper is facing a new obstacle when it comes to preparing Egypt for this year’s World Cup.

The tournament in Russia starts on the final day of Ramadan, the holy month that requires Muslims to fast from dawn to sunset. Egypt is scheduled to play its opening match a day later, on June 15, against Uruguay.

That means much of Egypt’s preparations for the World Cup – the country’s first in 28 years – will be done while the all-Muslim team is supposed to be fasting during daylight hours.

“If I deal with that pragmatically, I should turn the day upside down. Maybe Egyptian players are accustomed to doing this, but I as a Western person am not,” Cuper said late Tuesday on a TV talk show. “How can I train them at night around 11 or 12 after iftar (the meal Muslims eat at sunset to break their fast)? And how can I train them during the day without water and when they had nothing to eat?

“We are working on this and seeking to find the best way to overcome fasting fatigue and prevent it from hurting the players.”

Egypt, a record seven-time African champion, will also face host Russia and Saudi Arabia in Group A at the World Cup. Cuper, an Argentine who has coached extensively around his native country and in Europe, took over as national team coach in 2015.

There has been widespread speculation on whether soccer authorities in Egypt will request a fatwa, or a religious edict, from the country’s top theologian exempting the squad from fasting during the crucial month of preparation before the tournament begins.

In comments published Wednesday, Cuper said it would be up to the individual players to decide.

“Players of the national squad are absolutely free to fast and we cannot interfere in this because of my full respect for all faiths,” Cuper said, adding nutrition experts have been retained to advise the players on how to cope with fasting and sleeping during Ramadan.

In Russia, the Egyptian team will be based in Chechnya. Team officials have said they are happy to be in Grozny because it is a Muslim city where the players would be comfortable.

Devout Muslims refrain from food, water and sex while the sun is out during Ramadan. The lunar month is in May and June this year, with the long days making the fast a grueling 15- or 16-hour test of stamina. During Ramadan, Muslims break their fast at iftar, the traditionally large meal after sunset. Just before dawn, they eat another meal, sohour.

“I endure a great deal of hardship when I am fasting, but I prefer to honor my religious duty as long as I am able to cope,’ said Egypt defender Saad Sameer, who plays for Cairo club Al-Ahly. “I will fast the month of Ramadan, regardless of what the team decides.”

Another Egypt player, Zamalek midfielder Tareq Hamed, said he would abide by any decision reached by the team’s management on whether to fast.

“I hope we do well in the World Cup and not be distracted by issues like fasting,” said Hamed, adding he and many other players have in the past played matches while fasting.

Edicts exempting soccer players from fasting are not without precedence.

A 2008 edict by Egypt’s mufti, the country’s top theologian, exempted players from fasting during match days, arguing that if playing is what they do for a living then they should break their fast, provided that they compensate for those days after the end of Ramadan. Training, he said, did not provide grounds for breaking the fast.

The issue of Ramadan has showcased the religious dimension of sports, especially soccer, in Egypt, a majority Muslim country of about 100 million people, of whom about 10 million are Christians.

Egyptian match commentators routinely pray to God to come to the aid of the national team and they offer a prayer of thanks when they score. Beside the “Pharaohs,” the Egyptian national team has another nickname: “The Squad of al-Sajedeen,” or the team that kneels down and offers prayers, which they do after scoring.

It is also traditional for the team to collectively read the opening verse of the Quran before kickoff.
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Tuaregs in northern Niger are hoping to draw tourists back to the region by putting their traditional dances, music poetry and camel races on display.

 

Despite concerns about Islamic extremism throughout the Sahel region in West Africa, organizers recently hosted more than 1,000 visitors to a cultural festival in Iferouane, a village in Niger’s far north.

 

“Without tourism, our youth risks falling into idleness and misery, and will join the wave of migration to Europe,” said Mohamed Houma, the mayor of the town located about 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of the central city of Agadez.

 

The Air festival, considered one of the most important gatherings to celebrate the culture of the Tuareg people, has been held since 2001.

 

It was marked last month by the sound of tende, the Tuareg style of music and drumming, as the women and men, on foot and on their camels, participated in song and dance competitions.

Since 2001, the gatherings have been held to celebrate the culture of the semi-nomadic Tuareg people. More than 2 million Tuaregs live in the Sahara Desert area, stretching across Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Tunisia.

 

Niger’s Air region, with oases, mountains and sand dunes, has been a destination for adventurous Western tourists since the 1980s and the visitors have been a financial boon for the region. But the tourism has dwindled since the Tuareg rebellion, which lasted from 2007 to 2009, and from the proliferation of armed and extremist groups in the Sahel region.

Security guards watched over the dozen French and Belgian tourists who participated this year’s in Air Festival.

 

“We are very happy because this festival shows the rest of the world that despite the international geopolitical and security context, we live here in peace, sheltered from the upheavals of some of our neighboring countries,” Houma said.

French tourists to the festival this year included Jacques Maire, a French legislator who heads a France-Niger Friendship group in the French National Assembly.

 

While the situation in Niger is tense, he said it is not the worst in the region.

 

“There has always been a strong French appetite for the Sahara,” said Maire. “We must seize every opportunity to recreate tourist flows.”‘

 

 
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