Amazon Unveils 14 Pilots for Future TV Shows
— -- After months in production, Amazon Studios unveiled 14 original pilots Friday. Six are for a children's series and eight are for a comedy series, at least two of which will debut as full shows on Amazon's streaming video subscription service in the near future.
Anyone from the U.S., U.K. and Germany can watch the pilots for free on Amazon.com. Viewers are asked to complete a survey once they've finished watching the pilots to help determine which pilots are made into shows, and which are not.
Once completed, subscribers to Amazon's $79-per-year Prime service — which includes complimentary two-day shipping on Amazon.com orders, access to a Kindle lending library and a range of streaming films and TV shows, among other benefits — will be able to watch the shows at no additional charge. Amazon has not decided whether it will release all shows in a series at once, as Netflix did with House of Cards, or at regular intervals, a la traditional TV, a source at the company indicated last month.
Mashable readers may look forward to two pilots in particular: "Betas," a comedy about employees at a social media startup, and "Browsers," a musical comedy set at an online news startup.
The move comes as other players in the online video-streaming space, including Netflix and Hulu, up their investment in developing and distributing their own original series. By offering enough licensed and original content, Amazon hopes that consumers will find incentive to subscribe to its own as well as other streaming video providers, just as many consumers already subscribe to multiple cable channels.
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