Style Code Live

» see amazon.com/stylecodelive as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Amazon's first daily live show went out on 8 March 2016 at nine in the evening Eastern time. It ran half an hour of fashion and beauty talk, streamed free to anybody who turned up, Prime member or not. Lyndsey Rodrigues fronted it, which was a neat piece of casting because she had spent years doing live television on MTV's Total Request Live, a format that also worked by holding something up to a camera. Rachel Smith came over from ABC News, and Frankie Grande was there as the one bringing the volume.

Underneath the video player sat a carousel of products that updated in real time as the hosts moved through the segment. That strip was the entire point. It was the first Amazon show built to send the viewer directly to a product page, and it was Amazon's first serious attempt at live video of any kind. The thing it was aiming at was QVC, which had been selling from a studio on cable since 1986 and was still doing billions of dollars a year.

Live shopping had reached Turkey by then in its older form, the teleshopping blocks that filled the small hours on the lower channels, so the idea was not foreign. The version streaming on amazon.com was, though, in the ordinary way that a US-only show on a US retail site is: you could read about it and you could not watch it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ five nights a week ~

Five nights a week for fourteen months is not an experiment. It is a television operation with a studio and a crew, and a script that has to be finished by lunchtime every single day. Amazon staffed all of that and ran it as Amazon Original programming, then never once said how many people were watching.

That silence carried through to the end. When reporters asked at the cancellation what the viewership or the sales had looked like, Amazon declined to share either number, which tends to answer the question on its own.

~ the friday meeting ~

The news came at a staff meeting on a Friday in late May 2017, very abruptly by the account of the people in the room, just ahead of the Memorial Day weekend. The last program aired over that weekend. Staff were given until July to wind the operation down. The daily episodes stopped immediately and the show's social media pages were deleted rather than left standing. Amazon confirmed the cancellation and said nothing else.

Two years later Amazon Live arrived, the same shoppable stream with influencers in place of a studio and a nightly schedule. Then TikTok built a shop into the feed and live selling became a normal way to buy a lipstick. Amazon had read the format correctly in 2016 and got the production model wrong, which is the more expensive half to be wrong about.

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