Amazon has managed to attract more than 200 million customers to its Amazon Prime membership program, the company’s chief executive said in a letter to shareholders this week.
That number includes 142 million Amazon Prime subscribers in the United States who pay anywhere from $6 a month to $12 a month for special deals, free expedited shipping and certain digital perks, including unlimited cloud photo storage, millions of songs through Amazon Music and television and video content through Amazon Prime Video.
The figure helps make Amazon Prime Video one of the biggest subscription streaming services in the United States, though it was not clear from the shareholder letter how many of those customers regularly access or stream content from Amazon Prime Video.
Amazon Prime Video is also available as a standalone video subscription for $9 a month. It was not clear from the letter, penned by the company’s outgoing chief executive Jeff Bezos, how many people purchase Amazon Prime Video by itself.
Amazon Prime Video is indisputably part of the technology company’s core business, right alongside its retail and fulfillment operation and cloud computing solutions. The company spends millions of dollars each year producing and licensing original content for Prime Video and securing distribution rights to TV shows and movies produced by third party studios.
Last month, Amazon scored a lucrative contract with the National Football League that will allow it to stream Thursday Night Football games to Prime members and Prime Video subscribers, starting with the 2023-2024 football season. The deal was valued at around $105 billion, according to Bloomberg.
In addition to Amazon’s own original and licensed content, Prime Video offers subscriptions to third-party services, including Showtime, Starz, Britbox, Paramount Plus and Discovery Plus. Those third-party subscriptions carry a fee that varies between services; content is distributed natively through the Amazon Prime Video app on computers, tablets, smartphones, streaming set-top boxes and game consoles.
Amazon’s closets competitor in the streaming video space, Netflix, has amassed 204 million global subscribers, according to the website Fierce Video. Disney Plus comes in third with more than 100 million global subscribers based on figures announced last month.
