Prime Video has a giant viewers, and now Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has put a brand new quantity on it: The premium video service has greater than 200 million month-to-month viewers.
Jassy revealed the quantity in Amazon’s annual letter to shareholders Thursday. “Just lately, we’ve expanded our streaming TV promoting by introducing advertisements into Prime Video reveals and flicks, the place manufacturers can attain over 200 million month-to-month viewers in our hottest leisure choices,” the CEO wrote, spanning films, TV reveals and dwell sports activities just like the NFL’s “Thursday Night time Soccer.”
“Streaming TV promoting is rising rapidly and off to a powerful begin,” he added.
On Jan. 29, Amazon started working advertisements in Prime Video content material in main markets together with the U.S. except customers choose to pay further ($2.99/month within the U.S.) to have an ad-free expertise. Some analysts have forecast Prime Video advertisements producing greater than $3 billion in income in 2024.
Observe that “viewers” is a unique metric than subscribers (or accounts). For instance, as of the tip of 2023, Netflix counted 260.28 million whole subscribers globally, that means Netflix’s attain by way of whole variety of viewers is even greater than that.
Within the letter, Jassy additionally reiterated that Amazon believes Prime Video — which began as a method to improve the worth of the Prime free-shipping program and to drive up ecommerce purchases — is usually a profitable standalone enterprise.
“Now we have growing conviction that Prime Video is usually a massive and worthwhile enterprise by itself,” the CEO wrote. “This confidence is buoyed by the continued growth of compelling, unique content material (e.g. Thursday Night time Soccer, Lord of the Rings, Reacher, The Boys, Citadel, Highway Home, and so on.), Prime Video prospects’ engagement with this content material, development in our market packages (via our third-party Channels program, in addition to the broad number of reveals and flicks prospects hire or purchase), and the addition of promoting in Prime Video.”
Not talked about by Jassy: In February, disgruntled Prime prospects filed a lawsuit towards Amazon accusing the tech large of false promoting and misleading practices over the change by Prime Video to serve advertisements by default. (Amazon has declined to touch upon the swimsuit, which seeks class-action standing.)
Additionally in Jassy’s letter to shareholders, he touted the promise of generative AI, saying it “often is the largest know-how transformation because the cloud (which itself, remains to be within the early levels), and maybe because the web… [T]his GenAI revolution can be constructed from the beginning on high of the cloud. The quantity of societal and enterprise profit from the options that can be potential will astound us all.”
Amazon has invested $4 billion in AI start-up Anthropic for a minority stake within the firm. Beneath the partnership, Anthropic is utilizing Amazon’s customized chips to construct, prepare and deploy its future fashions and has made a long-term dedication to supply AWS prospects entry “to future generations of its basis fashions.”
“We’re constructing a considerable variety of GenAI purposes throughout each Amazon shopper enterprise,” though “the overwhelming majority will finally be constructed by different corporations,” Jassy wrote within the letter. Amazon’s tasks on this space embrace the AI-powered purchasing assistant Rufus, an “much more clever and succesful” Alexa and promoting capabilities to make it “easy with natural-language prompts to generate, customise and edit high-quality photos, promoting copy and movies,” he wrote.
