Amazon Prime Video’s Greg Hart at APOS

Greg Hart, VP, worldwide, at Amazon Prime Video, discussed consumer engagement and partnerships with distribution platforms in his APOS session today.

Amazon has more than 100 million Prime members worldwide, Hart said. The online retailing giant added video to its Prime customer loyalty subscription in the U.S. in 2011. “We found that entertainment changed behavior,” Hart said. “Customers converted to a paid Prime membership at a higher rate and renewed their Prime membership at a higher rate and their overall engagement increased.”

The Prime Video service went worldwide in 2016. “We’re focused on making sure we offer fantastic content and that we’re distributed as widely as possible.”

Hart said the service is seeing growth in every market, driven in part by its originals from the U.S. and internationally. The company has done more originals in Japan than any other international market, Hart said.

In the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan, Amazon Prime Video features three elements—the SVOD service delivering TV and movies, the TVOD offering and the third-party channels that members can subscribe to, such as HBO, Showtime, Starz and CBS All Access in the U.S. Across the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan, Amazon Prime has more than 200 channel partners. “We want to keep expanding the footprint we have across the three legs of the stool,” Hart said.

On Amazon Prime’s entrance into the sports business, inking deals with the NFL and English Premier League, among others, Hart said: “OTT creates a real opportunity to deliver to sports fans the ability to watch what they want, when they want to watch it, how they want to watch it. It creates opportunities.”

Since its launch, Amazon Prime Video has expanded the slate of devices it’s available on and has been pursuing distribution partnerships with telcos like BT and Deutsche Telekom and cable operators such as Comcast. “The more platforms that we’re available on, the greater the engagement,” Hart said. New partnerships announced at APOS include Telstra and Fetch in Australia.