TBI Tech & Analysis: How the wheels are turning on Amazon’s streaming strategy

The Wheel Of Time

As Amazon moves forward with plans to bring Prime Video SVOD originals to its AVOD service Freevee, Omdia’s Matthew Evenson digs into what lies behind this new content strategy.

Amazon has announced that it will be adding more than 100 films and TV series that were originally commissioned for its Prime Video SVOD service to its free ad-funded service Freevee.

Initially launched in 2019 as IMDb Freedive, Freevee offers both on-demand and FAST channel content to users in the US, the UK, and Germany. The Prime Video content will sit alongside Freevee originals such as Jury Duty, Bosch: Legacy and High School and other third-party library content.

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Impact assessment and outlook

The table on the right highlights some of the Prime Video titles being added to Freevee either now or across the rest of 2023.

There is a clear hierarchy of titles here: older titles are being added to Freevee in their entirety whereas newer shows – some of which are still running – are only being partially added, and there are clear and different aims for the older and newer titles.

The older titles have largely run their course on Prime Video, and so adding them to Freevee exposes them to a new audience and improves Freevee’s overall catalog.

For the newer series, however, the aim is to use Freevee as a shop window to entice Freevee users to begin watching a show and ultimately encourage them to sign up for Prime Video to see all other existing and upcoming episodes of that show.

The first three episodes of The Summer I Turned Pretty will be available on Freevee from 26 May  ahead of the show’s second season launch in July 2023, while the full first seasons of Reacher and The Wheel Of Time will be added to Freevee closer to the respective releases of those shows’ second seasons on Prime Video later in 2023.

The move is indicative of the ongoing efforts by streamers and studios to diversify their revenue streams amid current uncertainty regarding the long-term viability of subscription streaming business models.

This assessment was taken from Omdia’s TV & Video Industry Developments Impact Brief – May 2023, which is available to read in full here.