Amazon Prime Video Channels just may be the most powerful growth driver in subscription video, particularly for niche offerings, but Amazon wants to make sure we all don’t forget it.
At its Culver City, Calif. offices last week, just a few miles west of Downtown Los Angeles, Amazon had research company Antenna present data for its “Engage Summit 2025” event. The event was covered by Variety, TheWrap and other local TV business trades.
Presenting for Antenna, CEO Jonathan Carson revealed that the average subscription video-on-demand platform gets 5.6 million subscribers it wouldn’t otherwise garner via inclusion in the Prime Video Channels marketplace.
Further, Carson said that Prime Video Channels add-on subscriptions accounted for 25% of all U.S. SVOD signups in the first quarter.
This wasn’t necessarily shocking news. As Carson also pointed out, the erstwhile WarnerMedia saw HBO Max lose 5.1 million subscribers when the service was wrenched out of Amazon’s marketplace in 2021. When, fresh off the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, David Zaslav and team put Max back into Pime Video Channels in late 2022, it quickly re-added 3 million customers.
Amazon’s “channels” offering — emerging as the first of its kind almost a decade ago — remains a powerful business driver even for video companies that operate similar markets for third-party content. Also according to Antenna, after Apple TV+ was placed into Prime Video Channels early in the fourth quarter of 2024, it was getting 25% of its signups via Amazon by December.
This access, of course, comes at a price. As Variety noted, SVOD operators typically share around 30% of their revenue with Amazon when they participate in Amazon’s Channels.
Notably, as the bundling trend takes further hold in the video business, some operators are trying to accentuate their Amazon Channels performance by combining forces. For instance, Starz and Hallmark Plus announced last week a bundled service offering that will take $5 off the monthly combined $19-a-month bill for both SVOD platforms when they’re purchased via the channels marketplace.