Prime Video's Low Engagement Is Amazon's Big Opportunity

While nearly every streaming service has some small subset of zombie subscribers—one in four people pay for a service they never use, per research from Lending Tree—Prime Video is in a league of its own. The streaming service, by dent of its status as a perk of an Amazon Prime subscription, has an atypically large number of subscribers who have access to the platform, but rarely use it. According to data from the Consumer Intelligence Research Partners shared with ADWEEK, nearly three in 10 Amazon Prime subscribers in the U.S. did not use Prime Video in 2024. And in the most recent Nielsen viewership ratings, despite having more than 200 million subscribers, Prime Video only accounted for around 3.5% of total time spent in February. That is less viewership than Disney, which has fewer subscribers, and just 1.4% more than the Roku Channel. Prime Video captured around 3.5% of total viewing time in February, despite having over 200 million subscribers. But, for several reasons, these low usage rates could actually be good news for the streaming service. Amazon declined to comment. Prime Video viewership is increasing First, CIRC data indicates that while a substantial chunk of Amazon Prime subscribers still do not watch Prime Video, the percentage of those who do is growing. This increase in viewership is likely the result of a number of factors, but the primary one is the increased investment Prime Video has made into its programming, according to Prohaska Consulting analyst Chris Cifarelli. The streaming service has steadily built out its library of proprietary programming for more than a decade now, producing Emmy-winning series like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Fleabag, and Fallout. It acquired creative control over the James Bond franchise in February, eight years after doing the same with Lord of the Rings. Perhaps more critically, it has made substantial investments in acquiring the rights to premiere live sports offerings, which attract large, recurring live audiences. According to The Information, Prime Video is spending around $3 billion per year on sports rights alone. The strategy is part of a larger initiative from Amazon chief executive Andy Jassey to make Prime Video profitable by the end of 2025. The platform acquired partial rights to Thursday Night Football in 2017, and then exclusive rights to the program in 2021. And last year, it signalled a significant shift in the power dynamics of the streaming landscape when it outbid Warner Bros. Discovery to become one of only three distribution partners, alongside Disney and Comcast, for the NBA. “With Prime Video, it is less about acquiring subscribers and more about ‘turning on’ their existing ones, and content is driving that shift,” Cifarelli said. “The sports rights, in particular, seem to be effective on that front.” Low viewership means a higher ceiling for monetization Unlike other streaming services, which have to build a subscriber base to monetize it, Prime Video has the benefit of piggybacking on the more than 200 million subscriptions to Amazon Prime. The downside of that built-in audience is, of course, that many Amazon Prime subscribers pay for the service for the free shipping rather than the video programming, producing its below-average engagement rates. It also means that a standard view could be less valuable than those on other platforms, where subscribers are paying explicitly to access the service, according to Markacy chief operating officer and president Ryan Mason. "The range of effectiveness on Prime Video is wider than most streamers," Mason said. "On one hand you have Thursday Night Football, whereas on the other you have someone putting Jack Reacher on in the background." But the upside is that Prime Video does not have to put as much work into acquiring subscribers as its peers; it simply has to get those preexisting subscribers to tune in. If, or once, the platform is able to do that, it will have a massive monetization opportunity on its hands. Prime Video introduced ads to the service last year, making it the largest ad-supported streaming platform overnight. Under this new, ad-supported model, the more time a Prime Video subscriber spends watching the service, the more revenue they generate. “Our original point of view on Prime Video is that it was important to the benefit mix of Amazon Prime,” said CIRC research analyst Josh Lowitz. “Now we see it as a meaningful source of streaming media in its own right.”

Streaming & OTT

Prime Video's Low Engagement Is Amazon's Big Opportunity

Nearly 40% of Amazon Prime subscribers don’t watch the streaming service, per Consumer Intelligence Research Partners

Mark Stenberg

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