Format

It’s the news of the week: Amazon’s Prime Video has officially unveiled its partnership with MrBeast. For those few who don’t know him, MrBeast is maybe the most influential social media superstar: with over 245 million subscribers, he is the most-subscribed individual on YouTube, and the second-most-subscribed channel overall (after the Indian record label T-Series).
But that's not all: Prime Video wanted to overdo it, producing “the biggest reality competition series ever” with the “biggest single prize in the history of television and streaming”: Beast Games - that’s the title of the show - will see 1,000 contestants competing for a US$5 million cash prize, surpassing the previous record of the Netflix’s series Squid Game: The Challenge, that gave away a prize of “only” US$4.56m.
(Prime Time also overdid it by announcing the number of countries where the show will be available - 240, but in fact the world’s nations are less than 200 ; ).
MrBeast himself (whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson) will exec produce - together with Amazon MGM Studio - and host the series, which is described as a “fast-paced and high-production format.” The greenlight comes less than two months after reports emerged that MrBeast was in talks with Amazon to sign a deal for nearly US$100m.
Exaggerations aside, the operation seems to be very interesting indeed, and confirm the phenomenon of ‘tele-digitalisation’, i.e. the inevitable process of the gradual shift from linear channels to the digital dimension (see FE 16th February, about the special edition of “classic” tv show The Chase performed by The Sidemen, Europe’s biggest YouTube creator collective).
Moreover, the world of MrBeast - made up of elaborate and extreme challenges, with large giveaways and prizes (here a famous example) - fits perfectly into such an operation, because it is very suitable for a television program (even though these ‘old’ terms no longer make much sense in the contemporary fluid cross-platform audiovisual context). Television is changing, not necessarily for the worse.
To read the other news about the west/east connection and a reality about “French power”
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