One fun aspect of Amazon’s video streaming platform is that, unlike literally every other TV network and streaming service, it releases the pilots for its potential new shows to the public, giving the filthy normal people a chance to vote on which shows move forward and which get banished to the land of wind and ghosts. Unfortunately, there’s a reason that literally everybody else does it the traditional way, and Amazon might soon follow suit. According to a report from Deadline, there’s a “real possibility” that Amazon will stop making all of its pilots publicly available before making pick-up decisions, with former Amazon Studios head—and accused sexual harasser—Roy Price suggesting earlier this year that the competitive TV marketplace sometimes requires taking shows straight to series rather than waiting to see if random Amazon users will vote for it to go forward.
Amazon currently only has two pilots in production, Greg Daniels’ Upload and Making Friends from Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, with a bunch of high-profile straight-to-series stuff already in the works, including that Lord Of The Rings show, Carnival Row, and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. That seems to indicate that the current pilot program is already effectively being deemphasized.