Fremantle said on 4 August 2026 that Prime Video has taken the forthcoming Baywatch series and the complete original catalogue across a dozen international territories, moving eleven seasons of a franchise that once drew a billion weekly viewers onto an ad-supported streaming service.

The announcement, published on Fremantle's corporate news page and amplified the same day by parent company RTL Group on LinkedIn, covers two distinct pieces of inventory. One is a new 12-episode season co-produced by Fremantle and FOX Entertainment, scheduled to premiere on Prime Video in 2027. The other is the archive: all nine seasons of the original Baywatch plus both seasons of Baywatch Hawaii, which will land on the platform in the same territories ahead of the reboot.

According to Fremantle, the territories are Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Benelux, Switzerland, Austria, Turkey, Canada, Latin America and India. FOX Entertainment Global holds all domestic distribution rights, and Fremantle manages international sales.

The catalogue is the larger asset

Reboots attract the coverage. The back catalogue is the part that changes an inventory calculation.

Eleven seasons of an hour-long procedural represent several hundred hours of programming that can be scheduled, recommended and monetised continuously, rather than in a burst around a premiere window. Fremantle's own description of the arrangement frames the archive as a lead-in, giving audiences the chance to revisit the original before the new instalment arrives. For an ad-supported service, that lead-in period is also a period of ad breaks against library content acquired at library prices.

The scale of the original run explains why the archive carries weight. First screening in 1989, Baywatch aired in more than 200 countries and, at its peak, reached more than a billion viewers a week, according to Fremantle. The original series starred David Hasselhoff and, in the company's account, launched the careers of Pamela Anderson, Carmen Electra, Jason Momoa and Yasmine Bleeth.

The new season carries a different cast. Stephen Amell takes the lead as Hobie Buchannon, alongside Jessica Belkin, Shay Mitchell, Hassie Harrison, Thaddeus LaGrone, Noah Beck and Brooks Nader. David Chokachi returns as Cody Madison in a recurring role, with Livvy Dunne as Grace. Erika Eleniak, Michael Bergin and Kelly Packard guest star in their original roles. Matt Nix serves as showrunner and executive producer, with McG, Michael Berk, Greg Bonann, Doug Schwartz, Dante Di Loreto and Mike Horowitz as executive producers. McG directs the premiere episode.

Michela Di Mondo, EVP Distribution, Canada & International at Fremantle, brokered the deal. She described the arrangement as a partnership that brings the new series to audiences across multiple territories "while also giving fans the opportunity to revisit the original series they know and love."

Where the territory list meets the ad map

The commercial reading of the announcement depends on a question the press release does not address: which of those territories actually carry advertising on Prime Video.

Amazon introduced advertising across Prime Video in January 2024 and, according to the company's fourth quarter 2025 results, the ad tier operated in 16 countries. That list includes Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands and India, all of which appear in the Fremantle territory map. Canada joined the ad rollout in February 2024, in the same wave as the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria.

Several named territories sit outside that confirmed perimeter. Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey and the wider Latin American region beyond Mexico and Brazil have not been named in Amazon's disclosed Prime Video advertising markets. The distinction matters for planning: in an ad market, the catalogue becomes sellable inventory on arrival; elsewhere it functions as subscription retention content until the ad tier follows.

That gap is consistent with a pattern in Amazon's rollout sequencing. The company took nine months to extend zip code level Prime Video targeting beyond the United States, adding Canada, Mexico and Brazil in July 2026, with European availability still unannounced at that point. Feature availability and inventory availability move on separate clocks.

Scale on the ad side is not in question. Prime Video reported a global ad-supported audience of 315 million viewers as of the fourth quarter of 2025, up from roughly 200 million disclosed in April 2024. In Germany, one of the largest territories in the Fremantle list, Amazon put average monthly ad-supported reach above 17 million customers at its first German upfront on 4 June 2025, adding that 95% of those viewers had purchased on Amazon within the previous three months and spent 75% more than average customers.

Amazon reported advertising services revenue of $19.8 billion for the second quarter of 2026, a 26% increase, the strongest rate across the six quarters covered by its supplemental disclosures.

What a title-level archive does inside the targeting stack

The value of a large, recognisable catalogue is not confined to impression volume. It also feeds Amazon's content signal infrastructure.

Amazon Marketing Cloud added Prime Video viewership signals on 11 November 2025, introducing three data types into the clean room: content title information, content type classification and show-level engagement metrics. Those signals reached open beta in the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia first, with the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy and France scheduled for the first quarter of 2026. Separately, Prime Video Channel Insights moved out of beta to all eligible marketing partners in November 2025, allowing partners to relate content exposure to downstream customer actions.

A franchise with eleven seasons and near-universal name recognition is a more useful analytical object in that context than a single limited series. It generates a durable, repeatedly viewed title cluster that can anchor audience modelling rather than appearing as a one-off spike.

Measurement infrastructure in the largest European territory has also moved. AGF Videoforschung and Amazon announced Prime Video's integration into Germany's standardised measurement framework via Nielsen server-to-server technology in October 2025, with ad-supported video on demand data entering the SCOPE analysis tool in November. German buyers evaluating the Baywatch archive therefore assess it inside the same currency used for domestic broadcaster inventory.

Amazon has continued building creative capability against that inventory. The company introduced Dynamic TV Creative at its 2026 upfront, personalising interactive video ads on Prime Video series and films according to viewer shopping behaviour, a mechanism that depends on the deterministic link between a Prime account and a viewing session.

A production arm selling to its parent's competitor

The structural detail most likely to interest European media buyers is the corporate geometry.

Fremantle belongs to RTL Group. RTL Group also operates Ad Alliance in Germany, RTL AdAlliance for international sales, Smartclip for video advertising technology, and the RTL+ streaming service. Those units compete directly with Amazon for German and French video advertising budgets. RTL Group nonetheless posted the Prime Video agreement to LinkedIn on the day of the announcement, describing it as a distribution milestone for colleagues at Fremantle.

The arrangement is not an anomaly. Fremantle produces more than 11,000 hours of programming a year across an international network operating in 28 countries, selling to RTL channels and to external clients including Netflix and Amazon. The division has carried a medium-term revenue target of €3 billion and an adjusted EBITA margin goal of 9% by 2026.

The wider financial backdrop gives the sale additional weight. RTL Group reduced its full-year 2025 adjusted EBITA guidance from approximately €780 million to €650 million in November 2025, citing weaker television advertising markets in Germany and France, and eliminated roughly 600 jobs in Germany. Digital advertising revenue rose 27.1% to €230 million in the first half of 2025 while traditional television advertising fell 6.9% to €1,018 million. RTL Group completed its acquisition of Sky Deutschland for €68 million, bringing approximately 12.3 million paying subscribers across the DACH region under one parent.

Content licensing revenue from a competitor is uncorrelated with the linear advertising cycle that has been squeezing the group's broadcast units. That is the commercial logic. It also means a European broadcaster's production arm is supplying premium library depth to the platform absorbing budget from its own sales houses.

The domestic side stays with FOX

The split of rights is clean. The new series debuts on FOX in January 2027, ahead of the Prime Video premiere later that year, and FOX Entertainment Global retains all domestic distribution.

That places the United States window inside a sales structure that has been consolidating. Fox Corporation agreed on 15 June 2026 to acquire Roku for approximately $22 billion, combining live sports and news with Tubi and The Roku Channel. FOX also closed its 2026 upfront ahead of other presenters and, according to the company, delivered 142 billion ad impressions measured through its iSpot arrangement.

Two windows, two ad stacks, one production. The domestic broadcast premiere monetises through FOX's linear and digital portfolio; the international streaming window monetises through Amazon DSP and Amazon's direct sales. Advertisers running multi-market campaigns against the same title in 2027 will be buying it through unrelated systems with different measurement bases.

The archive drop matters more than the premiere date

European CTV budgets have been rising against a supply base that is expanding faster than measurement standards. CTV reached 26% of total media budgets in 2026, up three percentage points year over year, and more than half of marketers expected over 60% of CTV buying to run programmatically. At the same time, 43% of buyers reported limited or no confidence in knowing where their ads actually ran, according to IAB research published in 2026.

Recognisable library titles address part of that discomfort. A named franchise is a content environment a buyer can identify, evaluate and, through title-level signals, verify after the fact. That is a different proposition from undifferentiated long-tail supply.

The timing is the practical point. The catalogue arrives before the 2027 premiere, according to Fremantle, without a specified date. The reboot has a fixed anchor in January 2027 on FOX. For planners building 2027 European video budgets, the archive represents inventory that becomes available first, at scale, in markets where Prime Video advertising is already live.

Neither Fremantle nor Amazon disclosed financial terms, episode-level ad load, or a catalogue launch date.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Fremantle, the content production arm of RTL Group, and Amazon's Prime Video, with FOX Entertainment as co-producer of the new series. Michela Di Mondo, EVP Distribution, Canada & International at Fremantle, brokered the agreement.

What: A multi-territory international deal placing a new 12-episode Baywatch season on Prime Video, alongside the complete original catalogue of nine Baywatch seasons and two seasons of Baywatch Hawaii.

When: Announced 4 August 2026. The catalogue arrives ahead of the new season, which premieres on FOX in the United States in January 2027 and on Prime Video internationally during 2027.

Where: Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Benelux, Switzerland, Austria, Turkey, Canada, Latin America and India. FOX Entertainment Global retains domestic distribution rights.

Why: For Amazon, eleven seasons of a globally recognised franchise add durable library inventory to an ad-supported service that reported 315 million global ad-supported viewers as of the fourth quarter of 2025 and $19.8 billion in quarterly advertising revenue. For Fremantle, the sale converts catalogue and new production into licensing revenue uncorrelated with the European television advertising decline that pushed its parent to cut profit guidance and reduce headcount. For media buyers, the territory list extends beyond the markets where Prime Video advertising has been publicly confirmed, making the catalogue immediately sellable in some countries and subscription-only content in others.