TBI Tech & Analysis: How Amazon has stayed ahead of the AVOD game

Bosch: Legacy

While global streamers such as Netflix and Disney+ are readying themselves to add AVOD tiers to their services, Amazon has been doing this for some time – offering such an option since 2019.

Originally known as IMDb Freedive, then IMDb TV, and finally Freevee, the ad-supported option first appeared in the US as a carousel on the site alongside Amazon’s SVOD offering, Amazon Prime Video, before also launching its own standalone app. It has since been rolled out internationally, in the UK in 2021, and in Germany in 2022.

In the US, Freevee supports both on demand viewing with ads (AVOD), as well as FAST channels (pre-programmed linear feeds, designed for web-based streaming).

AVOD has become a much-discussed topic recently, with Disney+ announcing an ad-supported tier to launch in the US later this year and Netflix widely expected to be planning the same. However, in contrast to Disney’s ad-supported option, which will offer the same content to its subscribers but for a reduced rate, Freevee operates as a separate service to Amazon Prime Video and can be accessed without a Prime subscription. It has a unique content catalogue, though there is some overlap.

As of Q2 2022, 1,922 titles were available on both IMDb TV and Amazon Prime Video. With the rebrand of IMDb TV to Freevee, Amazon dramatically increased its AVOD offering, from 2,020 titles at the end of 2021, to 9,451 titles now.

At the beginning of 2021, Amazon massively reduced its Prime Video SVOD library in US, cutting the number of titles from over 50,000 at the start of the year to a low of 6,930 in Q3 2021, before steadily increasing volume to 10,127 titles by Q2 2022.

During the 2021 purge, Amazon removed many of the less popular library titles from its SVOD catalogue as well as lots of user generated content which came to the service through its Video Direct offering. This had previously allowed independent filmmakers to upload their content to the site, either included for free with a Prime subscription (for which the creator would receive a royalty for video views), or through digital purchases or rentals.

Omdia has found that many of the titles which were removed from Amazon Prime Video’s catalogue at the beginning of 2021 have eventually ended up on Amazon’s AVOD platform. By Q2 2022, 5,176 titles on Freevee had been available on Amazon Prime Video before the cull. This means that titles from Amazon’s SVOD catalogue in Q1 2021 represent 54.8% of Freevee’s overall catalogue.

Our research partner, MediaBiz, tracks the IMDb rating of titles on SVOD and AVOD platforms. The IMDb rating is a weighted mean score of critic and user-generated reviews of films, on a scale of one to 10.

According to these reviews, titles on Amazon Prime Video are of better quality, with a higher average rating (7.3/10) than those on Freevee (5.6/10). While most of Amazon’s original content has so far been launched on Prime Video for paying subscribers, it has experimented by releasing some original titles on Freevee.

This includes Love Accidentally, a US romantic-comedy film that was launched in July 2022, as well as the police-procedural series Bosch: Legacy, a spin-off of the Prime Video original series, Bosch, which ran from 2014-2021.

Amazon houses more recent releases on its Prime Video service: 17.4% of titles on Prime Video have been released since 2020, whereas only 5.7% of titles on Freevee have launched since then. Prime Video also dedicates a larger proportion of its catalogue to film titles (76.6%) than Freevee (62.8%).

Ed Ludlow is senior data analyst at Omdia, the research arm of TBI owner Informa