What Does 'Amazon Prime' Have That Disney+, Netflix, Apple TV, Sky, & ESPN Are Missing ?

If you are an ‘Amazon Prime’ customer, you will benefit from seeing your choice of movies and Box sets at a time and device of your choosing, all as part of the ‘Prime’ package.

This also includes the ability for you to find out more about the actors, and locations along with the back catalogue of related media content. All due to Amazon acquiring IMDB some years ago.

IMDb is an online user generated database of information related to films, television programs, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, fan and critical reviews.

At January 2020, IMDb has approximately 6.5 million titles (including episodes) and 10.4 million personalities in its database as well as 83 million registered users.

IMDb began as a movie database on the Usenet group "rec.arts.movies" in 1990 and moved to the web in 1993. – source Wikipedia

With the worldwide pandemic accelerating content consumption at home via several streaming devices and companies the default model for all of them is 'subscription'.

Prior to launching Disney+ Disney were previously content partners to ‘Amazon’ and ‘Netflix’. However, as Disney’s ambitions to ‘own’ their audiences grew they quickly removed ‘Disney’ related content, including all back-catalogue media from all other streaming platforms.

By developing the 'Prime' proposition some years ago it now seems that whilst Disney chose to withdraw it's content from Amazon and Netflix in order to launch the 'Disney+' streaming service 'Prime' has helped the mighty Amazon create a significant point of competitive edge that others (including Disney+) are now finding it difficult to compete with.

It is highly possible that whilst watching your flavour of content on ‘Prime’ you were stimulated to ‘find out more’ via the IMDB function. if so, and with the magic and might of the Amazon behemoth you will also be able to gain access to many of the products that might have been featured in that movie or TV show you had just watched.

To secure this key USP Amazon has chosen to adopt what is known as a ‘walled garden’.

The purpose of this is to ensure audiences and visitors remain on the Amazon platform for all you need - and be assured it does not want to provide that level of service to anyone else who might be deemed a competitor.

Google under pressure (source BBC)

Fellow tech giant Google is currently involved in a battle with Australia’s competition watchdog over the payment of news content it uses on its site. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has published draft legislation which called on internet firms such as Facebook and Google to pay for the content they repost.

Google attacked the proposals this week saying its YouTube and Search features could be "dramatically worse" if new rules were brought in. This relates to a recommendation from the ACCC that Google shares more data with publishers about its users, and alerts them when it changes its algorithms.

While Google says it does pay for some news content it uses, the Australian regulator wants to “level the playing field” so publishers can negotiate these rates.

Paying for content

Some business experts argue that it’s only fair that the search engine giant pays publishers for their quality news content that it reposts. “Low quality ‘headline’ news will probably always be free, but added value journalism has a significant cost and if that cost cannot be monetised, it will be devalued or it will disappear,” warned Michael Wade, a professor at the IMD Business School in Switzerland and Singapore.

“Google, Facebook and others have been getting away with giving it away for free for too long,” Professor Wade told the BBC.

Google says it is currently working on a global licensing programme to pay publishers for high-quality content that it hopes to roll out later this year.

Netflix, Disney+, Sky and others are also operating in the streaming media sector but none of them have the functionality and user-friendly user experience to help deliver the same value we have just described about Amazon so they, like many others must rely on a subscription or advertising based model for revenues.

This clearly left a huge content void from which both Netflix and Amazon are now playing catch up whilst investing further into either licensing 3rd party content or investing as creators of original content themselves.

Disney+

In August 2020 Disney+ announced its subscriber numbers across these platforms had crossed 100 million worldwide. Of these Disney+ alone had crossed 60.5 million subscribers, the firm announced, far exceeding its own expectations. India alone accounts for 15% of Disney+'s global user base.

With the pandemic taking hold and keeping consumers home and advertisers slamming their wallets shut, key businesses, both the parks and studios businesses were severely impacted, with revenue falling 55 and 85% for the quarter, respectively. In such a dire environment, the direct to consumer and international segment grew its top line, even if profits were down. Source ‘Campaign Asia’

The truth is that the Television, magazine, and newspaper (publishing) industries are not in the business of content, they are in the business of audience aggregation.

The production and creation of content is a means to an end in order to drive bigger audiences from which they could previously monetise those eyeballs via advertising, or subscriptions, and to do this they need to produce and serve us content that captures our attention.

Have you heard of  'Shopify'?

It seems they have now set their ambitions in the TV content space.

Formed in January 2019, Shopify Studios is focused on developing and producing unscripted shows and films to air on TV networks and streaming services. Among the projects in the works is a feature-length documentary that will not feature Shopify’s brand nor any merchants that use its e-commerce platform, North said. One sign of how much of Shopify Studios’ work is marketing would be whether the studio is organized within the company’s marketing department. 

On Aug. 18, Shopify’s production arm Shopify Studios debuted its first TV show, an eight-episode reality series called “I Quit” that follows individuals who have quit their jobs to start their own businesses and will air on Discovery.

In my opinion the future of streaming content is inevitably going commerce. 

Shopify are one of those companies who do a much better job than most helping to leverage those young start-ups to get a business going right from their kitchen. 

They really do get the 'social media' entrepreneur and recognise that 'social commerce' is not a fad - its the future.

By leveraging the millions of 'work from home' people with their lofty entrepreneurial ambitions prior to this crisis, they are now on course to supercharge the model as more and more people are either furloughed, preparing for redundancy, or have already created that replacement income stream.

Several years ago, a few of us had had enough with those 'digital intrusions' that seem to be pissing everyone else off as well as me, so we set out to solve the problem for all sides on the commercial equation.

The primary objective is based around empowering audiences with the ability to access free to use additional and related 'content discovery'.

Effectively empowering audiences to ‘pull’ information via a 2nd screen in a way that does not distract from what they are already engaged with.

We do this by leveraging elements of the ‘Prime’ model for all broadcasters and digital publishers along with taking it to another level of immersive engagement for audiences.

Our solution takes the ‘Amazon Prime’ model one step further and encourages brands who want access to those audiences to produce relevant and ‘engaging content' not intrusive adverts. This related content can be consumed by audiences for free and monetised on behalf of the audience and content owners around the world via any device by simply utilising our technology.

Media Magnet (“MMtv”) has developed a ‘Content Trading Platform’ designed for a wide range of marketing channels - The Software Development Kit (“SDK”) is simply deployed as 'mobile first' on the broadcaster/publishers chosen channel – empowering audiences to remain with you.

• The platform captures ‘search’ related curiosity that would otherwise have gone to Google or Bing.
• It allows the audience owner to commercially service & benefit from that search activity in the same way that 'Prime' leverages the 'Amazon' catalogue and visitors .
• It provides you the ability to commercially ‘partner’ with like minded brands and content providers.
• Driving incremental evergreen revenues from audiences.
• Unlocking commercial value from latent content

It is aimed at working with rights owners, broadcasters, and publishers to retain audiences, and provide an immersive audience engagement experience whilst generating revenues.

To do this we set about building a content marketplace (CMP) platform that empowers content rights owners to keep audiences on a 'rights owners' primary content delivery platform when they (audiences) experience what Google calls 'moments.

Currently those non-Amazon ‘Prime’ audiences take their attention, traffic, and purchasing power away to Google, Facebook or other mainstream search and social platforms.

So, we give streaming companies like Netflix and Disney+ including all manner of digital publishers the opportunity to retain all that curiosity, including content insights as well as benefiting from the revenues they are currently gifting away.

The key objective to engage, immerse, and monetise audiences in a non-intrusive way.

During 2021 and subject to funding our objective is to deliver this 'experience' via 'live streams' for sport and other content related audiences.

If you would like to have a 'confidential' conversation please feel free to drop me a short note.