Commentary

Amazon Going Around The World; Will The World Know It?

This should get interesting quick. Published reports say that Amazon soon will be pushing its video service into 200 countries, creating a deep-pocketed competitor for Netflix which has a head start forging its global footprint.

Right now, in addition to the U.S., Amazon is only in the U.K., Japan, Germany, Austria and revving up for India, The Wall Street Journal says.

(It’s also available, in a limited and unpublicized way, in Australia, as of this week.)

In those countries, it likes to lock up regional hits and stars, while Netflix goes for a bigger global-appeal approach. That may be because Netflix is already all over the world. Its global expansion really pushed up a year ago to include everyplace unless you’re in China. It’s now in about 190 countries, the Journal says.
Putting those two heavyweights against each other would seem to increase the value of international content rights and likelihood of international casting.
Netflix has 87 million subscribers; its growth is slowing in the U.S. where it may have tapped out the market, or nearly so. Amazon Prime Video is harder to pin down. Investors.com, citing Consumer Intelligence Research Partners  tabulations, said at the beginning of 2016,  Amazon had more U.S. subscribers (54 million) than Netflix (44.7 million).
The trick is that Amazon Prime Video is just a part of a subscription to the Amazon Prime shopping service, and there were reports in the spring that something like 20% of the Amazon Prime customers never-- ever-- availed themselves to the video content, or possibly even knew it existed,  That's because Amazon never promotes it equal to its value, it seems to me. Maybe Amazon just has a hard time recognizing it's in the business? 
Amazon this year introduced a monthly Amazon Prime subscription, apparently so consumers could test out the shopping service, and possibly so the video-curious consumer could see what “Transparent” is all about.
It’s always struck me strange that a renowned merchandise marketer at one end of the business could be as confusing and lame on the other. Amazon Prime Video is misunderstood here, and now possibly, it will extend the puzzlement worldwide.
Actually, “announcing” Amazon’s global initiative was equally strange. Jeremy Clarkson, the star of the upcoming Amazon series, “The Grand Tour” automotive joke vehicle,  tweeted out that the program would debut in in 200 nations in December. “Amazon has gone global,” he tweeted, though like a lot of Amazon’s video adventures, you could have missed it.

pj@mediapost.com

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