Amazon Prime Video

Two Amazon Prime Video users claim the company violated a federal video privacy law by allegedly sharing information about their online video viewing with other Amazon-affiliated companies, and with outside businesses. In a class-action complaint, Virginia resident Meredith Beagle and Louisiana resident Jordan Guerrero allege that Amazon Services regularly discloses personally identifiable information to its parent company, Amazon Inc., “for audience measurement purposes, marketing purposes, market research purposes, advertising purposes, and other data collection and analysis purposes.”

Peacock had an exclusive playoff game this season, which drew 23 million viewers.

While other media companies have been paring back content spending, Amazon shelled out more than $2 billion more in 2023 for TV shows, movies and music than it did a year earlier. Amazon’s total video and music expense last year was $18.9 billion, representing a 14% increase from $16.6 billion in 2022, according to the company’s 10-K annual report.

MoffettNathanson sees the e-commerce giant’s move as more bad news for linear TV.

Jeremy Helfand, who rose from a position at Hulu to supervise all advertising sales across Disney’s interactive businesses will take the reins as a vice president and head of sales efforts for Amazon’s Prime Video, the executive disclosed in a post on Linkedin on Thursday.

In addition to major across-the-board viewership growth during the NFL season, Amazon Prime Video says it had major gains among younger and female viewers in its second year of the Thursday Night Football franchise. Younger 18-34 viewers averaged 2.4 million per game in 2023 — up 14% over a year ago versus its first year Prime Video airing (2.11 million) and 26% higher than the total that Fox/NFL Network earned in 2021 (1.9 million). For its entire 13-game schedule, Nielsen-measured TNF viewership was up 24% to 11.86 million viewers versus a year ago.

Crunchyroll said it reached an agreement with Amazon to distribute Crunchyroll’s subscription anime service on Prime Video Channels in the U.S., Canada, Sweden and the U.K., beginning Tuesday. Prime users can choose from $7.99 or $9.99 a month packages.

Massive, internally-produced originals such as Lord of the Rings should sit alongside acquired content and aggregated channels and content to drive usage of the Prime Video platform, says Kelly Day, VP of international at Amazon. That spin on aggregation echoes the “flywheel effect” that Amazon executives regularly refer to, meaning the way that content and e-commerce businesses drive each other.

Out of the major streaming services available in the U.S., Amazon Prime Video seems to be the most popular with consumers, per a new study from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). In a ranking of 10 streaming apps, Amazon Prime Video came out on top with an ACSI score of 80, an 8% increase from 74 in 2022. Peacock was the next highest (79), followed by Hulu, Netflix, Paramount+ and YouTube Premium, each receiving an ACSI rating of 78.

While video streamers have been moderating their marketing spending of late, Amazon Prime Video has gone in the other direction — up almost 72% versus the previous 12-month period with estimated $285 million, over the according to iSpot.tv. Another $18.4 million in media value came from Prime Video messages from associated Amazon TV-video platforms.

Prime Video has launched a brand new feature called Dialogue Boost which allows users to increase the volume of dialogue on a selection of the streamer’s original series and films. Initially conceived to support customers who are hard of hearing, the option, which will quiet down background music and other effects, is available for all Prime Video users to appease all styles of listening preferences.

DirecTV for Business has reached an agreement with Amazon Prime Video to distribute 20 Yankees games to bars, restaurants and other commercial venues across the baseball team’s home footprint. The Yankees’ home regional territory covers New York state, Connecticut, north and central New Jersey, and northeast Pennsylvania. DirecTV for Business customers will get access to the games for the 2023 season via their existing satellite equipment. DirecTV said it will make the games, which were previously exclusively available only on Prime Video, available to “thousands of sports bars, restaurants and other public places” without disclosing a specific number.

National Football League owners were unable to approve a plan to “flex” games to create better matchups for Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football and tabled discussions until May. The league and Amazon want to prevent poor matchups in primetime and a proposal would have allowed games to be moved from Sunday to Thursday with 15 days notice.

The better news? Amazon Prime Video’s median viewer age was seven years younger than any other NFL TV rights package.

In a major bidding war among top streamers, Amazon Prime Video has landed All Stars, a half-hour comedy series starring and executive produced by Reese Witherspoon, with a big two-season straight-to-series order.

By Nielsen’s count, 7.8 million people watched Amazon Prime’s coverage of last Thursday’s NFL game between New Orleans and Arizona. But Amazon says no, there were actually 8.9 million people watching. So which is it? You’ll have to judge for yourself. After each of its Thursday night games this season, Amazon has publicly contracted Nielsen in this manner. Neither company is saying the other is wrong, but neither is backing down, either. The result is confusion, most notably for advertisers.

Pop superstar Taylor Swift will release the teaser trailer for her highly anticipated album, Midnight, during the third quarter of tonight’s Thursday Night Football on Prime Video. Swift made the announcement on her official Twitter account after teasing it on TikTok. “If you tune in to the Thursday Night Football game on Amazon Prime, I’m gonna be showing a first look at the secret projects I’ve been working on very hard for a very long time, getting ready for the Midnights album. And you would see it before the Midnights album came out. So, meet me there?”

The league announced Tuesday that Amazon Prime Video will stream a game on the day after Thanksgiving. The first Black Friday game will kick off at 3 p.m. ET on Nov. 24, 2023. The teams will be announced in May when the regular-season schedule is expected to be released.

Like bruising touchdowns and highflying catches, serious injuries and specifically head injuries are staples of the football experience — and the football broadcast. So when Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa hit the turf Thursday night, suffering what appeared to be his second head injury in five days, it provided the first test of how Amazon, which is paying more than $1 billion to the NFL to broadcast Thursday night games, would handle what has become a difficult balancing act for the league’s media partners.

Kansas City’s 27-24 victory over the Los Angeles Chargers last Thursday averaged 15.3 million viewers across all platforms according to Nielsen and Amazon’s first party measurement. Prime Video Vice President Jay Marine said in a note to staff earlier this week that “our measurement shows that the audience numbers exceeded all of our expectations for viewership.”

The streamer, which once shared “Thursday Night Football” games with Fox, now has exclusive rights to that action and must convince some pigskin Luddites to plug into broadband. Streaming Thursday Night Football, after all, will require a different kind of remote — and familiarity with a home screen, not a cable box. “It is going to be a behavioral shift for people,” acknowledges Jay Marine, VP of Prime Video and its global head of sports. “Our job is to make sure they are able to find Thursday Night Football at its new home and make it as easy as possible to get into the Prime Video app and start streaming.”

With streaming services eager to acquire live content, professional sports leagues in the U.S. are taking the next steps. The NFL will be the latest with Amazon Prime Video’s debut of “Thursday Night Football” when the Los Angeles Chargers take on the Kansas City Chiefs.

The fully remote production launches tonight with a new mobile fleet of 16 that’s producing the games in 1080p with High Dynamic Range with around 250 people onsite for each TNF game. (Courtesy of Prime Video)

Amazon paid big bucks for the exclusive national broadcast rights to stream NFL Thursday Night Football starting this season, but 48% of the viewership for Prime Video’s first preseason game came via local broadcast, according to TVB. Stations in San Francisco and Houston delivered 494,135 impressions.

Amazon Studios on Saturday said its much-anticipated series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, broke viewership records, with more than 25 million people tuning in to watch on the first day. The show, based on the appendices of The Return of the King, premiered on Amazon Prime Video on Thursday in more than 240 territories and countries.

Soumya Sriraman, the former BritBox CEO who joined Amazon to lead its Prime Video Channels business in the U.S., is stepping down after two years at the SVOD. Sources indicate the executive is still at Amazon but will be leaving imminently for another role elsewhere.

Amazon’s Prime Video reached a deal with DirecTV to air its Thursday Night Football games in more than 300,000 businesses such as bars and restaurants. The announcement comes as the National Football League’s preseason is underway. DirecTV will air its first game with Amazon Prime Video — a matchup between the San Francisco 49ers and Houston Texans — on Thursday.