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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
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@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.
I feel like this is more of a competitor to Vimeo than Youtube for various reasons... Looking forward to giving it a shot! Thanks for sharing.
@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.
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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."
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)
@valdecarpentrie I doubt it for Day 1, but probably by the end of this year.
I wonder if there could be an interesting vlog-angle that Amazon could exploit here, or whether YouTube have it under-wraps already...
@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.
@bentossell agree with others who have pointed out this sounds more like a Vimeo On Demand competitor than a YT competitor.