Amazon Original Series To Feature Playboy's Hefner In 2017

Online retail giant Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has announced its approval of a brand new Amazon Original Series “American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story” based on the life of Hugh Hefner, the Founder of the Playboy magazine.

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About the Series

The docu-series will comprise a total of 13 episodes revolving around the life of Hugh, his adventures and the cultural impact he had on a world scale. The series is slated to debut on Amazon Prime Video in 2017 and, thereafter, it will be available exclusively to Amazon Prime members in the U.S., UK, Austria, Germany and Japan.

Access to over 17,000 hours of never-seen before videos and that too including 2,600 of Hugh’s personal scrapbooks, the docu-series’ producers have no dearth of resources. Right from the post-war American era to the launch of the men’s magazine in the year 1953, the series will take the audience through the 60 years of the magazine’s long run, along with its take on Hugh’s political and civil rights activism during that period.

Why This Move?

With rival online video content majors such as Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), Hulu and HBO having had substantial success with documentaries such as “The Jinx” and “Making a Murder,” it’s up to Amazon to compete against them with successful acts of its own. This docu-series on Henfer is expected to do the job for Amazon as the Playboy popularity can flow to the series that highlights its founder.

We note that the Playboy magazine having gone through a paradigm shift in the past year – what with its having been graded PG-13 and given up featuring fully nude models due to the prevalence of Internet porn – has now introduced a new model app. This app allows its users access to the magazine’s articles instead of just the explicit images that the magazine is known for. So the Amazon Originals series could be just the launch pad it needs to get back into people’s minds.

Zacks Rank

At present, Amazon has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

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