It was announced on May 26, 2021, that Amazon bought MGM for $8.45 million. Now, Amazon is in control of major franchises such as James Bond and Rocky Balboa. This is Amazon’s second-largest acquisition since the company paid $13.7 billion for Whole Foods in 2017. The official merger with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer includes a vast catalog of over 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows including renowned classics such as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind.
In a press release, Mike Hopkins, Senior Vice President of Prime Video and Amazon Studios stated, “The real financial value behind this deal is the trove of IP (intellectual property) in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop together with MGM’s talented team.”
MGM Chairman Kevin Ulrich also expressed his thoughts in a statement: “The opportunity to align MGM’s stored history with Amazon is an inspiring combination.” However, many questions are still up in the air about the ongoing battle between streaming platforms.
However, we at Video Librarian would like to know what librarians think about this recent merger between the world's largest online retailer and the 97-year-old studio. Some librarians are more receptive to the union than others.
Anthony E. Anderson, Reference and Collection Librarian of Doheny Memorial Library of the University of Southern California, says, “As an Amazon Prime customer, I am delighted by this acquisition. As a librarian, I worry that this may end up making less films available for the academic streaming market.” Michael Kankiewicz, Head of Multimedia Collections at the University at Buffalo says, “My main worry is that Amazon will no longer allow academic group/classroom/streaming/rights for MGM films, and require students to buy individual Amazon accounts to watch them.”
Lisa Hooper, head of Media Services at the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University, has an extensive opinion on the situation. She told Video Librarian, “Besides the larger, younger, and generally more diverse audience that MGM content will be in front of, the Amazon buyout of MGM Studios honestly has a lot to offer us as individual consumers and as academics. The potential is there to expand access to MGM’s catalog of classic cinema for the individual consumer, researchers, and students. We’re also seeing the realistic possibility of not only the entire television series becoming available but also potentially outtakes and live taping that was cut from the final production. That alone would be a tremendous treasure trove of research and study material for researchers and students of American culture.”
“Even though I see the potential for increased access, I see much greater potential for a loss in access that would be truly catastrophic for higher education and researchers of American cultural history. The historical depth of MGM Studio’s catalog simply cannot be undervalued. Unfortunately, their films are products of the social, political, and cultural milieu of their time which means they either don’t speak to the needs and interests of today’s society, they have deeply problematic displays of racism, xenophobia, sexism, etc., or both—and this undoubtedly means that fewer people in the public arena will want to engage with these titles," she continues
"We’ve seen in many streaming platforms that films with less playtime tend to get pushed to the back of the catalog or pulled from the active catalog altogether, so we need to be concerned about the criteria Amazon uses to decide which films will remain in their actively streaming catalog and which do not," Hooper says.
She also raises several potential issues, particularly with archival and preservation work: "In a related vein, we also need to be concerned with their commitment to archiving and preserving this content for the long haul and, if they are not prepared or interested in doing so, then we need to be concerned with their plans for de-accessioning and re-homing MGM content.”
Hooper believes that above all, “the question that looms large in every film librarian’s mind—will Amazon continue to allow MGM Studios content to be distributed with academic-oriented licensing or will it become locked behind individual user subscriptions via AmazonPrime? At the end of the day, it comes down to equity; it doesn’t matter what size our campus is, where our institutions are on the national pay scale, or the tuition rate, we all have faculty and students who simply cannot afford what amounts to hundreds of dollars in annual personal subscriptions to the multiple streaming platforms they need access to in order to succeed in their professional and academic careers.”
She also points the negatives of the consolidation, and the larger impact of the commercialization of historical cinema and digital preservation: “If we think about it, every other format of cultural creativity and expression is collected and made available to researchers and students through institutions of higher education. We collect these materials primarily to support the research and learning that happens on our campuses, but through that work, we end up building a record of lived and imagined cultural history that researchers interpret so we can all better understand the world and communities we live in. What does it mean, then, if some of the most iconic markers of our cultural history are not a part of that record because it was locked behind commercial enterprises? This is deeply disturbing.”
Finally, Hooper calls for all librarians to rally together: “We have to be very loud and united, I think, in our advocacy to Amazon for continued academic distribution of MGM Studios content.”
What are your thoughts about this recent merger? Let us know in the comments or email us at vidlib@videolibrarian.com.