Jeremy Clarkson’s New Show Versus Top Gear, Amazon and Netflix to Battle for Pink Slips

Netflix and Amazon are prepared to live life one quarter-mile at a time, as Netflix announced today they will be proactively streaming the new ‘Top Gear’ with Chris Evans internationally. This is a direct move to compete with Amazon and their new deal with Jeremy Clarkson, who still don’t quite have a name for the series yet.

The Guardian is reporting that Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer is playing coy, but it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here.

“Theoretically it should follow the deal of the old format where Top Gear is still under the terms of the old deal,” the Netflix exec said.

“So in many parts of the world we already have it picked up and we’ll continue to talk to them about doing it as well. The show is very popular on Netflix as you can imagine. There’s a change in format but people definitely prefer the British Top Gear over the local Top Gear in almost every country in the world.”

One important note here though, is that the British version of ‘Top Gear’ is extremely popular mostly because hosts Clarkson, Hammond and May are extremely popular and have an excellent chemistry. There is no doubt that the fans are likely to follow the original crew to Amazon on this one, but it should be interesting to see if Netflix can compete with the new series.

Top Gear is one of Netflix’s most popular shows, but only time will tell if this popularity fades under new leadership, or if the series has enough name recognition to keep it going against Amazon’s power move.