Earlier this week Amazon announced that it would be launching three new original series for Amazon Prime members next year. I Love Dick, Jean-Claude Van Johnson and The Tick will be available on Prime Video in five countries in 2017: the United States, the UK, Germany, Austria and Japan.
The new programming has some heavy names behind it, including director Ridley Scott and actors Kevin Bacon and Jean-Claude Van Damme, and will be available on the Amazon Video app for television, mobile devices and connected Fire TV devices to all Amazon Prime users in these five countries.
According to Joe Lewis, Head of Half-Hour Series at Amazon Studios:
“These pilots were vast in scope, disruptive in tone, challenging in story and sometimes even funny. It’s rewarding to see customers embrace them in such a huge way. We can’t wait to premiere these series next year on Prime Video.”
Users can preview all the pilot episodes here: http://amazon.com/pilotseason
Amazon Prime is one of the largest membership programs in the world with an estimated 80+ million members around the world. In the United States alone there are estimated to be around 54 million members. The service recently launched in India to mass acclaim, shortly after Amazon became the number one online retailer in the subcontinent.
Although original programming typically varies depending on the country where you access your account from, a lot of English language programming is still popular around the world. But Amazon faces the same problems internationally as Netflix does – lack of localized content. Despite the fact that Netflix is available in nearly 200 countries around the world, the bulk of it is still English programs.
Both companies as well as other international operators such as YouTube Red, the paid premium version of YouTube, will increasingly face challenges around having enough content to feed the tastes of non-English speaking members of their respective premium video streaming services.
Two common workarounds to this issue have been sub-titling and dubbing, components of what is known as the video post-production services industry, which is currently estimated at $6 billion. But often, the stories themselves don’t “fit” a particular country or culture. In such situations, dubbed audio or sub-titles don’t really help.
The only way around this is for broadcasters and streaming service providers to hunt around for local production houses in each of these countries and tie up with them to provide original local-language content.
That’s the only way this industry can grow even bigger in the next few years. As internet penetration grows, data speeds rise and mobile usage increases around the world, we keep consuming increasingly larger amounts of video content. That’s why Facebook is into it in a big way; that’s why Twitter is now streaming live sports to its audience; and that’s why every tech company from Apple to Zebronics is trying to get a piece of the video streaming pie one way or another.
In such a fast-growing consumer industry, Netflix still stands tall with the largest volume of original programming of all. Amazon, Google, HBO, Apple and others still have a long way to go, and the way Netflix is growing it could be years before they catch up to its leadership position.
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Featured Image: The Tick, copyright Amazon.com
