Now creators can distribute their videos through Amazon to reach Prime audiences. According to Variety:
"Amazon will pay partners 50% of the retail price for digital purchases, rentals and subscription fees. If they choose Prime Video distribution, creators will earn royalties of 15 cents per hour streamed in the U.S. and 6 cents in other territories (capped at $75,000 per year) under the standard terms."
h/t @sarahintampa (TC article)
IMHO, I never think to go to Amazon Prime to watch videos. Curious if others on PH use it often and what they think of this direction.
UPDATE: I just caught that Amazon is partnering with Conde Nast Entertainment, HowStuffWorks, Mashable, Business Insider, Machinima, and a few others via @ajs' tweet
@rrhoover@sarahintampa it's solving the issue of noise. I'm personally not a YouTube watcher due to all the poor content, but I know good content exists somewhere on the site. If the ratio of signal to noise was better I could more easily find good shows like the Fallout Nuka Break series for instance. If that were on Amazon, content discovery would be easier and quality would presumably be higher.
@rrhoover I never found any content to differentiate Prime Video from Netflix. And I think the exclusivity of Amazon Prime will mean Youtube remains the viral video platform of choice. Nobody wants to create content that can't be consumed by all. I'd also think this means anything that does get added to Video Direct will also be on Youtube.
@rrhoover@sarahintampa@ajs The various articles don't seem to say anything about content discovery and digital rights protection (something that Facebook has struggled with in protecting rights holders). Personally I hope they have upped their UI and recommendations game (people who watched x also watched y may not cut it). It's going to be fascinating to be part of the future of YouTube, Vimeo, Amazon, Facebook and others competing to provide the best quality content to paying and ad-supported users.
@itsthisjustin Fallout Nuka Break is a lot of fun, and we are evaluating it for inclusion on Findie (which, incidentally we built to deal with the signal to noise ratio issue). We are rolling out our "Ciné" channel on Findie soon - I would love to hear your thoughts on our current product. AVD is going to give Vimeo sleepless nights and I would love to be a fly on the wall in the IAC boardroom today.
Super interesting. "Amazon told Bloomberg the platform is meant for "professional" creators, the only requirements are having a video be in HD format, and including closed captioning."
@bentossell I don't think that is going to happen. This is for Amazon Prime members, so access is not free. This move seems more directed towards low to high budget independent filmmakers.
@joseph_lindsay@bentossell Yes I agree. Vimeo has done a deal with FilmFreeway and Amazon owns Withoutabox. This is the next step in their vertical integration (Amazon owns IMDB). That said, I can easily see companies like Great Big Story (owned by CNN) partnering with Amazon.
Interesting... As a previous Director @ Vimeo - I do see this as a direct competitor to Vimeo On Demand. Amazon's distribution is a lot healthier... Vimeo is mostly "in and out" (title/video based), and it's facing a harder uphill battle to be a destination. The special sauce of Vimeo on Demand is simply the fact that it's embeddable. What that allows is creators to build and host their own page, and embed the Vimeo player with the built in payment abilities. That gives the creator control over growth, and provides an alternative source of viewers than being discovered in the catalog.
Let's see if Amazon will support non-catalog discovery/distribution... If so, their flexible payment choices may put them above YouTube/Vimeo for some niche/indie creators as well as larger producers. Vimeo's "no ads" stance puts off some of the bigger "ephemeral" creators (e.g. news, reviews, etc.).
@chhhris it's such a complementary service that I think it'll be completely fine from a product market fit perspective - the question I have is: neither VHX nor Vimeo are providing the scale of distribution through YouTube (search) or Amazon (devices + subscribers). So it'll be interesting to see if content creators value "control and better economics" (Vimeo) over "distribution" (YouTube, Vessel and Amazon)
After their learnings from the twitch purchase I imagine Amazon have pretty amazing insights into video and interactions.
Whether it will be a direct competitor is to be proven however a video platform with potential to reach millions of viewers will appeal to a great deal of creators and amazons ability to rank in SERPS will be a real attraction to savvy creators and publishing companies.
I imagine Twitter and Facebook will be working with Amazon to host and integrate directly into the prime platform.
Google won't be happy either way
I recently cancelled my Netflix as I already have a Prime account which has better top-third content. Searching for something to watch on NF makes me feel like I'm channel surfing cable and settling on the least crappy thing to watch.
It will be interesting to see how Amazon video works as essentially an Amazon Marketplace like model
This can only be good news for visual storytellers and filmmakers, but unless Amazon absolutely nails content curation and discovery, it probably will be good news mostly for those creatopreneurs who excel at self-promotion (i.e. who have existing marketing budgets and social media reach).
Questions to be answered:
1) Content Discovery
How will Amazon curate, categorise, validate meta data and surface the best content? How will they "rate" content?
2) Digital Rights Management
How will they ensure that someone who uploads content holds the rights to that content? Facebook has struggled with this, quite notoriously.
3) How will this integrate with Withoutabox and IMDB?
Presumably this opens up the vertical integration opportunities with these two services. It's a pity that Amazon let Withoutabox develop a terrible reputation in the filmmaking community (that gave rise to FilmFreeway) and has let IMDB lag behind on the tech front.
4) What will ad-supported look like?
YouTube is of course well known for this. Vimeo specifically does not have it.
Having spent 2+ years building a quality-driven video content discovery platform, I know exactly the challenges that they face in consistently and accurately delivering outstanding content. Vimeo has done an admirable job of championing the independent filmmaker and visual storyteller, though at 46M monthly users and >50% of video views occurring off-platform, it will be fascinating to see what happens.
@tony_anastasi This relates only to fees derived from Amazon Prime Subscribers. It's capped at 500,000 hours per title in an annual period, multiplied by the hourly rate ($0.15 /h for the US, $0.06 /h for non-US). Presumably they did this because subscriptions involve unlimited access to content but cannot stream more than 8,760 h/year per account.
Here is the full text:
"Amazon will pay to you the rate set forth on Attachment A for the applicable territories, multiplied by the number of Hours Viewed in the applicable territory, provided, however, that Amazon will not be obligated to pay for any Hours Viewed for any Title in excess of 500,000 for all territories in any given annual period, which annual period will be prorated based on the portion of the calendar year which the you have the applicable Title available for Prime Subscription Access (the “Payment Cap”), it being understood that, for any Title, the Payment Cap will be reset to zero at the start of the each annual payment period, and if Amazon pays a sum equal to the Payment Cap in any annual payment period for that Title, notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, Amazon may continue to make that Title available during that annual payment period without further payment to you and you may not withdraw the Title from availability via Prime Subscription Access during that annual payment period."
Attachment A shows the $0.15 (US) and $0.06 (non-US).
This is really just another distribution channel. I don't like the idea that they cap payouts, but the average video won't hit that anyway. This is about having a bunch of videos, not just a one-time thing, although it would also be great for indie film people. I like that it's not exclusively to Amazon. Oh how distribution has changed since my film school days when only the big dogs with their fake indie studios had chances.
Very interesting. I use Prime Video often to watch shows not available on Netflix like Doctor Who, Veep, or The Man in the High Castle. If they add shows like CGP Grey or Crash Course, I probably would watch some of the longer videos on Prime instead of YouTube. This could be beneficial for some creators as platforms increase the rewards for exclusivity but I'm not sure if being tied to one platform works out best in the long run.
The videos would be behind the prime paygate, youtube is free. I just don't really see how Amazon will be able to justify the smaller audience and reach to content creators.
Seems like an inevitable move. Until Quiver came around (https://www.quiverdigital.com/), it cost tens of thousands of dollars to get your content on Amazon Video, or iTunes for that matter. It's still a couple thousand $$ though. All of Amazon Instant Video apps push Amazon Prime videos so much that if they want content they have to do something to lower the barrier to enter.
Very excited about this!! I never go to YouTube for content but am on Amazon Prime a lot. Their shows are top-notch, so I wonder if permitting us all to distribute our videos will dilute perception of quality. We'll see...
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