TBI Tech & Analysis: Diving into Amazon’s unique streaming strategy

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Amazon has been in the global streaming game for years but it has always trodden a slightly different path to some of its main competitors, particularly regarding localisation, as Omdia’s Ed Ludlow reveals. 

Unlike other international streaming services, Amazon Prime Video’s catalogue offerings vary considerably from market to market.

Indeed, research powerhouse Omdia has found that just 1.3% of titles in its catalogue are shared across the US and six other key international markets (Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK), much less than Disney+ (31.4%) and Netflix (36.9%).

It has also been ahead of the curve when it comes ad-supported streaming, most recently rebranding IMDb TV to Freevee.

Before that, at the beginning of 2021, Amazon massively reduced its Prime Video SVOD library in US, cutting the number of titles from over 50,000 in 2020 to roughly 10,000 by 2Q22. Many of the titles which left Prime Video then have ended up on Amazon’s AVOD platform: 5,176 titles by 2Q22, representing 54.8% of Freevee’s overall catalogue.

Cataloguing changes 

Working with its research partner MediaBiz, Omdia tracks the on-demand catalogue of major SVOD and AVOD platforms in the aforementioned seven major TV markets worldwide (Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and US).

Of the 53 streaming services tracked by Omdia, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Netflix are the only ones to operate a standalone service in every one of these territories.

Across these seven territories, on average Prime Video offers more titles to its subscribers than both Netflix and Disney+.

The number of titles that Prime Video offers in each country varies significantly. Subscribers to Amazon in France have access to 4,172 titles, less than half the 10,054 titles available in the US. This is a range of 5,882 titles. By contrast, the variation in the size of the Disney+ (814 titles) and Netflix (981 titles) catalogs is much smaller.

Not only does the size of Prime Video’s content catalogue vary significantly from country to country, but the make-up of that catalogue is also very different.

Across the seven countries tracked by Omdia and MediaBiz, Amazon Prime Video offers a total of 29,481 unique titles, far more than Netflix (10,702 titles) and Disney+ (3,188 titles).

Omdia considers an internationally available title to be a series or non-series title on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or Disney+ which appears on that service in all of these countries: Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK and US.

Of these three providers, Prime Video has the smallest number of internationally available titles: 389. This is just 1.3% of its overall catalog. By contrast 36.9% of Netflix’s catalogue, and 31.4% of Disney+’s catalogue are internationally available.

However, subscribers to Amazon have a larger proportion of content exclusively available in their county. Just over 16% of titles on Prime Video in US are available there and not in any of the other six countries in question. For context, 4.4% of Netflix’s catalogue and 2.7% Disney+’s catalogue can only be watched in US.

The edited excerpt above is from the upcoming report, The International SVOD &AVOD Landscape: How Amazon Stands Out On The Global Stage, which is being published by Omdia (a part of Informa, like TBI) in October. It has been written by Ed Ludlow.