HBO and Netflix tie for the most Emmy wins, taking home 23 each; Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel won eight awards; Hulu won four
HBO is still the Emmy champion — but it has some company at the top. — The streaming era has already turned the TV business upside down …
Context & Ripple Effects
This tie is the moment the prestige-TV hierarchy cracks. Back when Nielsen counted just 36% of US households on Netflix and 6.5% on Hulu Plus, the Emmys were HBO's annual coronation; by 2018 a streamer has caught the incumbent at 23 wins apiece, with Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel taking eight and Hulu four.
The result reads differently depending on which end of the arc you stand on. Four years later, HBO had reasserted itself — 140 nominations against Netflix's 105 heading into a ceremony where it took 37 wins to Netflix's 26, joined now by Apple TV+, Disney+, and Prime Video — while 2025 Nielsen viewing data shows Netflix's grip on the most-watched shows loosening to roughly half. The 2018 tie is the hinge point where one challenger became a crowded field.
First-order effects
- Netflix achieves award parity with HBO in the same year, converting 'streaming also-ran in prestige' into 'co-champion' — a direct marketing credential for its originals slate.
- Amazon's eight wins for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel give Prime Video its strongest Emmy proof point yet, while Hulu's four wins establish it as a credible third streaming player at the podium.
Second-order effects
- HBO responds by scaling up: within four years it merges HBO Max into an awards machine whose nomination and win counts exceed both the 2018 figures and Netflix's, per the related coverage.
- Broadcast networks are squeezed out of the middle — by the 2022 nomination cycle their total falls to a new low of 86, below any single major streamer except the leaders.
Third-order effects
- Awards power disperses across many platforms rather than consolidating behind Netflix: by 2025, Nielsen finds five services sharing the Top 10 most-watched shows and Netflix's share of them down from over 80% in 2021, mirroring how the 2018 two-way tie foreshadowed a fragmented field.
- Prestige recognition decouples from audience dominance — the same period sees streamers' Oscar nomination counts fall sharply from 37 to 19 — suggesting awards become a branding battleground distinct from viewing share.
The trend: Television's awards economy is fragmenting from a single HBO hegemony toward a contested multi-streamer field where prestige wins and audience share no longer move together.