If we asked you how many streaming services is too many streamers, you’d probably at best say a number you can count on both hands. And yet Amazon Prime Video via its subscriptions has “more than a 100” different streamers you’ve probably never heard of that you can get without needing a hundred different logins and passwords.
On Thursday, Amazon and NBCUniversal announced that Peacock Premium would now be available as a subscription add-on via Prime Video. It means instead of subscribing directly to Peacock, you can get all of Peacock’s content by adding it to your Prime membership (it’s priced at $16.99 per month and $169.99 per year and is ad-free). That in itself isn’t notable, but with Peacock joining the fray, it leaves Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu the only major streamers that you can’t get on Amazon.
HBO Max returned to Amazon not long ago after being away, and Apple TV+ joining the service was a big coup considering the two tech giants are massive competitors and that Apple fancies itself as its own one-stop shop for people to stream whatever they want. Some of the other subscriptions you can add include Paramount+, FOX One, MGM+, Crunchyroll, STARZ, BET+, AMC+, and BritBox, to name just a few.
While those are all streamers that have their own apps you can subscribe to directly, Amazon also has plenty that don’t have their own terrestrial apps you can download and are only available through places like Amazon or other channels. One we previously reported on was Wonder Project, which is the faith-based company behind “House of David,” and today they announced it launches on October 5, just to add to the hundreds of services.
Because Amazon also offers many of these streamers as part of bundles, it makes it that much less likely that you cancel Amazon Prime entirely. It also helps Amazon as a brand, because although Peacock may officially be the home to “Poker Face” and “The Traitors,” if you’re accessing those shows and HBO’s and Paramount’s all through one platform on Amazon, the average user begins to not even be able to tell the difference.
Such is the utopian vision of streaming that many executives have long touted, that there will be one super streamer to rule them all and you won’t have to do guess work to figure out which service has the show you actually want to watch (some people used to call this cable). Amazon is inching closer to being that leader, but they’d have to still make up a lot of ground if it was going to convince Netflix and Disney that they need it. Netflix is dominant enough on its own that other studios — including NBCUniversal — continue to license their content to Netflix, and that Netflix doesn’t need to rely on any other bundles to keep people from canceling. Disney meanwhile has taken great pains (and billions of dollars) to merge the functionality of Disney+, Hulu, and the newly launched ESPN streamer into one place.
But Amazon must be doing something right if even Peacock sees the value of hitching its wagon to the big guy.
SOURCE: IndieWire
