Turn on Amazon‘s Prime Video on Election Night, and you will see the streaming giant do something it has never done before: live coverage of a breaking news event.
Brian Williams, the former NBC News and MSNBC anchor who will host Election Night Live, has described the special as the first “new product introduction in the Election Night space since color television.”
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In an interview with Deadline, Williams wouldn’t go into specifics but promised a reveal of “our own exclusive IP.” A set built on a Culver City soundstage will be “all LED,” and he will be mobile “between different areas of the studio where analysts and journalists and a historian or two and our data folks are working.”
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He said that he has asked Amazon to take no breaks during the special, but “I don’t know if I’ll win that tug of war.”
“I think we go a minimum of 10 hours, and I think it will grow north from there,” Williams said. “We don’t want to miss a moment. We don’t want to miss a vote. We certainly don’t want to miss a projection, and along the way, we’re hoping to offer fantastic context from veterans in the field.”
All of the major broadcast networks are planning ongoing election coverage on their streaming channels, which also appear on the Amazon platform. NBC News Now, for instance, plans to start coverage at 7 a.m. ET and continue late into Wednesday evening. The NBCU streaming service Peacock, meanwhile, is taking a page from the Olympics by offering a multiview of NBC News Now, the Steve Kornacki cam and election results and a balance-of-power map.
By contrast, Williams said that Prime Video is building out its facility from scratch. “They realized they had to take a big bite and write a big check,” he said.
“Given [Amazon’s] potential customer base, given their deep pockets and their willingness to underwrite a live election night broadcast, I think we’re in for what certainly feels to me like it might be the next big thing,” he said. “And I say that, as I have said before, no one was more bullish on over-the-air broadcasting than I was. No one was more bullish on the reach and power and influence of cable news than I was. So after 41 years in some form of over-the-air television, I’m going to try to walk on the wild side.”
It’s been three years since Williams departed MSNBC, signing off from his popular 11 p.m. ET show The 11th Hour as his contract expired.
Since then, he has been the source of media interest as to where he would land next, with reports that he was being approached by other networks like CBS and CNN. There even was speculation he would be a candidate to host Jeopardy!, something that at one point piqued his interest.
“I think I was a couple years into a 10-year run at Nightly News when, that is correct, my attorney Bob Barnett passed along a query, ‘Did I want to be the host of Jeopardy!?’ We had exactly one family meeting about it, and talked about the pros and cons, and how difficult it would be to explain that ‘Dad’s now a game show host,’ and I politely turned that down,” Williams said.
“I was flattered to be considered, and it’s been flattering to have meetings with these companies, but [the Amazon election special] was really the first thing that got the old juices flowing. And I am all in: my life is focused on one night.”
Among the participants in the special will be Shepard Smith, Douglas Brinkley, James Carville, Mike Murphy, Abby Huntsman, Erin Perrine, Erin McPike, Jessica Yellin, Mother Jones‘ Garrison Hayes, former Rep. Tim Ryan, Puck’s Tara Palmeri, Axios’ Hans Nichols and the Washington Post‘s Jackie Alemany, among others. The program will be produced by awards-show veterans Glenn Weiss and Ricky Kirshner, with Jonathan Wall serving as executive producer and showrunner and Weiss as director.
Obviously, the main viewer interest will be in election night results, and the production will rely on Reuters for data. Williams said that “our methods will be revealed when folks tune in.”
“We are going to try to make this quite different while of course bearing down on the fundamentals,” Williams said. “We have no idea where the story will take us. We will do our due diligence and we will stick the fundamentals, and I think deliver some voices that cover all bases.”
There is the possibility that a projection will not be made until days later, or even into the weekend, as happened in 2020. Whether the special stretches into addition days “is entirely up to Amazon, kind of like Have Gun, Will Travel,” he said. “We are available. They may not want to get into the business of days of rolling coverage. Who knows? We have to wait until we see what story we are handed that night. For our purposes, though, we’re going to go as long as possible in this grand experiment and see where it leads us.”
Amazon has made clear that the special does not mean it is launching a news division, but Williams said he will “be available for any discussions” as to whether this leads to other live news event coverage.
“They will have to gather after this night, take a look at it, take a look at return on investment,” he said. “They have boldly gone into all of these spaces, beginning with their birth as the original disrupter,” citing Amazon’s ventures into live sports, including the NFL, the NBA and NASCAR.
Jonathan Giegengack, founder and principal at Hub Entertainment Research, praised the idea of the special, one that fits into Amazon’s strategy “of trying to get into live programming in general.” He said that it also may offer a “fresh alternative” as some of the established news organizations grapple with falling viewership and increasing polarization. By offering the special without a paywall, he noted, Amazon will “get more engagement with users who aren’t already watching.” That ultimately could help in Amazon Prime Video’s pitch to brands as they scale up their advertising plans.
That said, as much as streaming is moving into live events, others are curious as to whether the special will offer something on election night that viewers don’t get elsewhere.
Former CNN anchor and correspondent Frank Sesno, professor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, said that with so much of the cable universe moving to opinion and talking heads, there is an opportunity for streaming channels to do something different.
“What they have going for them is they are not perceived as one way ideologically,” he said.
Williams also is very funny, someone who can offer fact-based information but with a different voice and style, Sesno said. A hurdle is that election night options are not just the major broadcast and cable networks anymore, but an array of other news-based streaming channels, podcasts and even other linear options like NewsNation.
“I am a gigantic fan of anything that brings better, smarter, truth-seeking coverage to politics, but this is a competitive space,” Sesno said.
The special also is being billed as non-partisan, but Williams’ The 11th Hour became known for his wit and sharp analysis, spotlighting major journalists as guests at the end of a day’s news cycle. There is some expectation that sensibility will carry over into the Amazon special.
As Williams sees it, “a lot of journalists have had to unlearn the rules we were raised on of a kind of reflexive, comparative fairness because of the rhetoric that we hearing,” adding that “standards and practices have become something of a moving target as we deal with a series of firsts in journalism and in American history. I think the legacy media are doing their level best to cover a fast-moving target.”
In his signoff from The 11th Hour in 2021, he said, “The truth is I am not a liberal or a conservative. I’m an institutionalist. I believe in this place, and in my love of country I yield to no one. But the darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods. It is now at the local bar and the bowling alley, at the school board and the grocery store. And it must be acknowledged and answered for.”
That assessment has not changed.
“I think we are at an inflection point,” Williams said. “I think some of that will be settled on Election Night, while some of it will only become more hyper. And I just think this is a tricky time in our history, and I think a lot of folks worry about where we are headed, about the status of the American Dream, about who we are in 2024. Some of those answers will be provided. The voters have a funny way of making up their own mind and delivering the storyline to us.”