Amazon Stops Using Pilot Episodes to Garner Audience Feedback

Amazon has decided to stop its experiment of putting the first episodes of developing content referred to as the "pilot episodes", the media reported.

Up until now, the company released the pilot episodes to get customers' feedback on what episodes should become a series.

"I'd never say 'never' but that version is not something we're doing. We'll use our own testing barometers and some user data but the public voting process has been set aside for now," a Television Critics Association (TCA) report on Saturday quoted Jennifer Salke, Head of Amazon Studios, as saying.

"One of the things we learned is it took too long to get shows customers wanted. You end up taking way too long to get the actual season done," the report quoted Albert Chang, Amazon's co-head of TV as saying.

The customer feedback on pilots helped in making some of the most critically acclaimed and popular series to date including "Transparent" and "Mozart in the Jungle", the company had acknowledged earlier.

Amazon first got into the original series game six years ago with series like "Bosch", which was a detective fiction and "Hand of God" which was a psychological thriller.