Amazon’s Hollywood ambitions are very old

Out of everything Jeff Bezos once said that a quote can summarize how, exactly, Amazon It will affect Hollywood: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes.” He said that in 2016, At the Vox Code conference, but the point remains true. Unlike Netflix, streaming is not a basic activity on Amazon. Prestige TV and movies are another offering for customers to reclaim Prime memberships, which gets them to buy more stuff through Amazon. It’s a very old school business strategy: always keep coming back for more.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s Amazon Purchase MGM. It’s a legacy Hollywood studio with 17,000 TV shows and 4,000 movies RoboCop and James Bond movies — in the box. Agreement, he announced in May, has not yet closed, and has already received an examination by the Federal Trade Commission. But if it goes ahead, Amazon will be able to access all of that content, as well as more studio infrastructure, to share it as the company wants and make money. This is also not as bold as Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal or Time Warner in conjunction with AOL (remember?). Or AT&T acquired a new and infamous acquisition of Time Warner Warner Bros. Discovery. But Amazon isn’t telecommunications, and it’s building a lot a wider portfolio before almost any other company. “I think they did what AT&T did,” says Omdia streaming analyst Sarah Henschel, “better and broader.”

Buying MGM, more than anything, could give Amazon the biggest advantage wars streaming. Analysts anticipate streaming services will not have the same growth as subscribers they saw last season in 2021 Covid-19 locks, so for now the name of the game is retention. Netflix has 200 million subscribers in the north; Disney +, about 100 million. Amazon claims more than 175 million of its 200 million Prime members have posted something from their video service in the past year, but it’s hard to say whether these users would subscribe to the Prime Video service as a standalone service. Streaming accounts for 26% of all US television time. according to Nielsen analysis company; Netflix only takes 6 percent, three times as much as Amazon Prime. But ultimately, that gap may not matter, as the content is a bonus for people who want a two-day delivery. All this money that Amazon gets with shoes can continue to go into purchases like Amazon Studios and MGM and can still go ahead. Like Apple, which is a hardware business that provides streaming service, it encourages its core businesses to be creative. This is very important, especially when new streamers like Paramount + and Peacock are being created right now, which require viewers ’money and eyeballs.

“We are now in a new era of television and video consumption,” says Gartner analyst Eric Schmitt. “80 years ago, 75 years ago, we had NBC, CBS and ABC. Now we have Netflix, YouTube and … Amazon? There’s a chance and why wouldn’t you do a play?

For Amazon, a big part of that play is the MGM deal. Netflix has spent billions of dollars filling an original movie and TV war box. HBO Max gets its massive catalog from the major company WarnerMedia, thanks to Warner Bros., HBO, Adult Swim and other consolidated content machines. Disney + is the same; Hulu too. Amazon Studios has come up with good things — Bezos wasn’t joking with the Golden Globes — but the service has never had much to offer. Instead building one, He took out Amazon and bought it, just like how he pushed it live sports earlier this year, something few opponents offer.