Five years. That’s how long fans waited for their first glimpse at Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel since it was first announced by Amazon Prime Video. Fans of the J.R.R. Tolkien series finally got their wish during this year’s Super Bowl, and it appears they were very impressed. The teaser trailer for Amazon’s upcoming series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, set a Super Bowl record, racking up 257 million views on the day of its release.
This isn’t a new trend. In fact, Amazon has been killing the OTT game for over a decade now. Amazon subsidiaries include Prime Video, FireTV, Amazon Music, Amazon Studios, Twitch, IMDb TV, and Audible. The industry giant owns a slew of other companies, but these are the primary Amazon OTT streaming services. So, how did Amazon get where it is today?
Amazon OTT Services Beyond Prime Video
In recent years, Amazon has taken its OTT ventures beyond just its own branded platform. In addition to Prime Video, Amazon has made some big moves in the streaming game. Below are some of the most notable Amazon subsidiaries and how they function.
Amazon Fire TV
Amazon Fire TV is a video streaming service created by Amazon that physically connects to a television or monitor and allows users to watch TV shows and movies through apps like Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video. This format launched in 2014 and is similar in nature to Roku, as it centralizes a whole host of other streaming apps. All someone needs to use Amazon Fire TV is a device—like an Amazon Fire TV Stick—and an internet connection.
Twitch
In 2014, Amazon acquired Twitch for nearly $1 billion after an intense bidding war with Google. Twitch is a platform primarily used to broadcast and watch video games being played live by gamers and online creators. It turns out there is a huge market for this kind of content, with numerous huge communities forming around Twitch creators and their channels. In this way, it very much functions as a social media platform in addition to being an entertainment venue.
Twitch claims to have an average viewership of 2.5 million at any given moment, making it a huge platform for content creators focused on building community. Amazon Prime members can enjoy unique features of Twitch, such as tiered channel subscription options. Twitch recently announced it would expand its streaming content beyond video games to include television shows and sports, including 11 NFL games. Select NFL games are also now being streamed on Prime Video.
IMDb TV
This is an interesting one. Rather than taking the traditional subscription-based approach used by most streaming platforms (including most of the other Amazon OTT options), IMDb TV offers the ability to stream movies and TV shows for free. Amazon has actually owned IMDb—the Internet Movie Database website and app—since 1998, but its coinciding streaming service is relatively new, launching in 2019.
While the service is free, people still have some qualms about it. Specifically, people say that ads are disruptive, with commercial breaks typically occurring in 90-second segments. Regardless, the platform does have a significant audience, likely drawn in by the price (or lack thereof) and association with IMDb, the choice movie review database for many.
Audible
Audible is an Amazon company that produces and distributes audio content, including radio and TV programs, digital audiobooks, and podcasts. The company was purchased by Amazon in 2008 and has become one of the premier platforms for streaming audio content over the past decade. Users pay a subscription fee and in turn, get access to over 200,000 audio programs.
Amazon Prime, OTT, and the Streaming Landscape of Tomorrow
Clearly, Amazon has gone all-in on over-the-top streaming in the past decade. Amazon and Amazon subsidiaries account for hundreds of thousands of streaming offerings—from movies, to television, to podcasts.
It will be interesting to see what other companies take advantage of OTT platforms at the same scale as Amazon in the coming years. Disney is definitely one industry giant to watch, offering ESPN+ for sports and Disney+ for movies. The company also owns ABC, Marvel, and Lucasfilms. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see some big moves from them in the near future.
All of this goes to show that in the world of OTT, the possibilities are endless. There is a wide variety of content out there and a wide variety of ways to share it.
