Enough reports have come in that it’s now reasonable to believe that Amazon is close to getting involved in the OTT space through an ad-driven video platform. This is big news for consumers, and current OTT-industry giants like Roku. Amazon has a lot of capital at its disposable, and if they do decide to enter the OTT vertical, they can likely become one of the major players in the space almost instantaneously.
Multichannel News reports that an Amazon IMDB unit is deep in the development process for a video on demand service (AVOD). This would reportedly be an ad-driven service that would offer catalog-level movies and television shows to Amazon Fire users, at no extra cost.
For those who follow the OTT space, this concept probably sounds very familiar. That’s because it is incredibly similar to the Roku Channel service. Roku Channel is Roku’s ad-driven programming outlet that has been wildly successful. In fact, Roku Channel doesn’t just exist within the Roku ecosystem of hardware, but can now be accessed via the web as well.
According to the Information repost, Amazon does not want their system to compete with Roku, but rather give the company a way to better capitalize on the ad-supported programming market. This is a clear goal for Amazon, as they are reportedly now third in digital ad revenue, behind Google and Facebook—an impressive feat.
Amazon has been aggressively expanding its market footprint for years, making it no surprise that they want to become more involved in the OTT ad-driven video space. Remember, Amazon Prime Video is effectively already an OTT platform that has been extremely successful. It stands to reason that Amazon would want to become more involved in an industry that there customers are clearly interested in.
Sources:
https://www.multichannel.com/news/amazon-reportedly-at-work-on-roku-channel-like-ad-supported-vod-service
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/report-amazon-mulls-building-its-own-ad-product-for-ott-tv/533350/
