The Emmy Awards will leave broadcast television after this year. The Television Academy and Amazon’s Prime Video announced a six-year deal this week making the streaming service the exclusive global home of the Emmys beginning with the 2027 ceremony, ending the decades-old rotation in which the telecast alternated among the four broadcast networks, according to reports of the announcement.
The ceremony will continue to air live in September and, notably, will be available free to viewers worldwide with no Prime Video subscription required, Amazon said. Financial terms were not disclosed. The Emmys, first held in 1949, honour acting, writing and production in television and have been one of broadcast TV’s flagship promotional events.
The move follows the same migration already announced for the film world’s biggest night: the Oscars will stream live on YouTube globally starting in 2029, leaving their longtime broadcast home. Awards shows, once the justification for live broadcast’s existence, are becoming streaming’s trophy shelf.
For the broadcast networks, the loss is symbolic as much as financial. Emmy night was the one evening the industry gathered to celebrate itself on its own medium, in front of an audience that has been shrinking for years. A global, free, streaming telecast trades the remaining prestige of that arrangement for reach the wheel deal could never offer.
Television honouring television on a platform television did not predict is a fitting sentence for the industry in 2026. The invitation list will be familiar; everything about how the world watches it is new.
Practical questions outnumber ceremonial ones for now: how streaming handles a live global telecast’s delays and spoilers, whether clips will travel further free worldwide than they ever did behind broadcast windows, and what happens to the local-station ecosystem that built its Septembers around carrying the show. The Academy is betting that the audience it has been losing on broadcast is findable, free and global, on streaming, and 2027 will grade the bet in public.
US News Zone will continue to follow this story as further results are confirmed.
The first Prime Video ceremony is scheduled for September 2027, with eligibility and categories unchanged for the 2026 broadcast season covered separately in our reporting.
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