By Timothy Stenovec, Huffington Post
Amazon Prime fans love the service for the bargain it delivers. For a $79 annual fee, they get free two-day shipping on nearly 20 million items and one free ebook each month from the company’s Kindle library. Yet nearly one-fifth of Prime customers don’t use one of the service’s best features: streaming video.
A recent report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, a Chicago-based research firm, found that 19 percent of Prime members never use Amazon Prime Instant Video, the company’s Netflix-like streaming service. Forty-seven percent of Prime members, CIRP found, use it at least once a week.
To be sure, Amazon hasn’t been marketing Prime’s video feature very aggressively, and analysts have pointed to Prime Instant Video as a service thrown in just to make Prime more attractive and get more people to sign up. After all, Prime members tend to shop more frequently, spend significantly more and buy more expensive items, so enticing people to join with perks makes sense.
Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment about the share of Prime members who stream free video. But the company has been spending a lot of money to secure exclusive rights to TV shows and movies, and, like Netflix, is starting to develop its own series. “Alpha House,” a political comedy starring John Goodman, and “Betas,” a comedy that centers on a group of developers at a Silicon Valley startup, premiered last fall, and there are at least three children’s shows in the works.
Amazon recently released an ad for Prime that Rich Greenfield, a prominent media analyst at BTIG, called an “attack ad targeted at Netflix.” The two-minute spot featured a testimonial from a Prime customer: “Who needs to subscribe to another video service — you get video, great movies right there on demand as part of Prime.”
Read the full article by Timothy Stenovec from Huffington Post.
