Prime Video Monday released the official trailer for its fashion special Savage X Fenty Show Vol. 3, debuting Sept. 24 on the streaming service. 

The special will feature performances by Nas, Daddy Yankee, BIA, Jazmine Sullivan, Ricky Ricky Martin, Normani, and Jade Novah. Celebrities wearing the new Savage X Fenty collection during the show include Adriana Lima, Alek Wek, Behati Prinsloo, Emily Ratajkowski, Erykah Badu, Gigi Hadid, Irina Shayk, Jeremy Pope, Leiomy, Lola Leon, Mena Massoud, Nyjah Huston, Precious Lee, Sabrina Carpenter, Thuso Mbedu, Troye Sivan and Vanessa Hudgens.

The new Savage X Fenty collection will be available to shop in the Amazon Fashion store and at Savage X Fenty, according to the streaming service.

U.S. operators of over-the-top services will generate nearly $28.8 billion in subscription and advertising revenue this year, up about 26% from 2017, according to a new report from Digital TV Research.

Not surprisingly, much of that revenue growth will come from Netflix, which is forecast to grow revenue from around $11.7 billion in 2017 to about $15.8 billion this year.

Related: Netflix Misses Sub Target by 1M; Stock Slides

By 2023, Digital TV Research projects that U.S. OTT revenue will reach $47.8 billion.

Globally, the research company forecasts OTT revenue to grow by 30% to $69 billion in 2018, spiking to $129 billion by 2023.

Subscription video on demand services including Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video will see their total global revenue increase from $44 billion in 2017 to $69 billion by 2023, the research firm also predicted. 

Advertising-based video on demand services (AVOD) like YouTube, meanwhile, will see total global revenue increase by 36% from 2017-2023 to $47 billion.

Just the faintest whiff of a story — an unconfirmed report that Amazon is developing a networked digital video recorder that could live-stream video to connected TVs and phones — ricocheted across the internet and sent waves of fear across the embattled giants in the television industry.

Citing an unnamed source, Bloomberg said Amazon’s Lab 126 research and development center is working on the device, code-named “Frank,” that could reside in a customer’s WiFi network, recording live-streamed shows that could be ported to and streamed by over-the-top devices like Amazon’s Fire TV.

Amazon didn’t confirm the story, much less describe any kind of street date or retail price.

But forgive the roving crowd of Wall Street analysts, Silicon Valley investors and old guard media giants if they seem a little irrationally perturbed about a streaming device that doesn’t even exist yet.

While Wall Street and pretty much everyone else remains transfixed by the disruptive power of Netflix, many in the industry recognize that more than any other single corporate entity, Amazon has the potential to genuinely transform the way TV is produced, distributed and consumed.

The online retail giant, which is approaching its own $1 trillion market capitalization (currently at $926.6 billion) is just getting started in the TV business and, more often than not, just a whiff of news that might signal the direction of its next big move is a big story.

A Leader Among Loss Leaders

In recent months, incumbent media and telecom conglomerates have scrambled to create alliances, culminating in The Walt Disney Co.’s $71.3 billion purchase of 21st Century Fox’s studios, cable networks and other assets, with the primary objective of achieving the kind of global scale that can compete with Netflix.

The challenge for traditional media companies, beholden to production budgets, ratings points and advertisers, is to take on a streaming superpower that’s valued differently by Wall Street, and, according to The Economist, will spend between $12 billion and $13 billion on content this year alone.

Netflix, for example, doesn’t measure the success of an original series like Stranger Things based on ratings or advertisers. And the company itself isn’t valued on profits and losses. Indeed, last year Netflix said it posted negative $2 billion in free cash flow, and another $3 billion to $4 billion in 2018.

Wall Street analysts are more concerned with Netflix’s subscriber growth and its increasing global scale. Thus, the performance benchmark is more esoteric — how much, in the grand scheme of Netflix’s business model, will Stranger Things help it improve on a global subscriber base that had reached 131.1 million as of the end of June?

In the current confines of the subscription video-on-demand business, Amazon’s Prime Video is a second banana, catering to a U.S. base of 26 million viewers (compared to 56 million U.S. customers for Netflix), and spending only around $5 billion on content this year.

If Netflix’s benchmarks for success in the global film and TV business appear to be competitively mismatched, Amazon would seem to take this dynamic to an entirely new level.

“Fundamentally, Amazon sees itself as a retailer,” Brett Sappington, senior analyst for Parks Associates, said at a pay TV industry event in May.

Amazon’s $119-a-year Prime service combines free shipping on a mind-numbing array of retail products, free music, photo storage — and access to Prime Video, the world’s second-largest subscription streaming platform, among other perks.

The latter — with about 125 original series — is there merely to augment virtual foot traffic to the sprawling retail business, which drove a profit of more than $2 billion in the second quarter, Amazon’s biggest to date. For a company with $178 billion in revenue last year, it’s a loss leader in many ways.

The key question for all players: Will Amazon expand its video business to drive retail sales? “The scary part for me is, of all the companies out there, I think it would be entirely possible for Amazon to come out and say, ‘Guess what — you don’t have to pay for local broadcast [channels],’ ” Sappington said. “ ‘We’ll cover that for free as part of Prime. And if you want cable bundles on top of that, we’ll sell that through Amazon Channels.’

“You want to talk about shifting the industry? How about be a Prime member and get free pay TV,” he added. “That is scary.” Add on to that a package of games from the National Football League, or the National Basketball Association, which Amazon could easily afford.

Part of that anxiety might rests in the breadth and depth of the video business Amazon is creating. Few companies in the ecosystem, for example, could pull off the massive scale required for networked DVRs.

Indeed, beyond serving a business agenda that is far different than any other company in media and telecom, Amazon’s video acumen is also distinguished by its vertical integration. From Amazon Studios to Prime Video, the SVOD business competing directly with Netflix and Hulu, to Amazon Channels, an a la carte marketplace where customers can subscribe to individual services like HBO Now or CBS All Access, to its Fire TV streaming-device ecosystem, the company seems poised to control all links of the content value chain.

Studio Commits to Bigger Bets

The top of that value chain, the Amazon Studios unit, was roiled last year when studio chief Roy Price stepped down amid sexual harassment allegations, followed out the door by comedy and drama chief Joe Lewis. Former NBCUniversal, Fox and Aaron Spelling Productions executive Jennifer Salke quickly stepped in, and began immediately swinging for the fences with ambitious original series including The Lord of the Rings and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.

The series adaptation of Rings required a $250 million investment for the rights alone, with first-season production and marketing costs reported at $250 million, per Reuters. The division is building on a solid base of wins, with 2016’s Manchester by the Sea, which won two Oscars, and Transparent, which took home a total of 10 Emmy Awards in 2015 and 2016.

Judging by the upcoming debut of The Romanoffs, the latest series from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, Amazon is still hot on the trail for awards.

And, like Netflix, Amazon Studios appears to be heading down the path of signing big-name talent, announcing recent first-look deals with Jordan Peele (Get Out) and Amy Sherman-Palladino (creator of the Amazon hit The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), among other creatives.

Distribution Ramps Up, Too

As Amazon places bigger bets within its production pipeline, it continues to grow and evolve its distribution systems.

To date, the more-established Prime Video, which competes directly with Netflix in subscription streaming and reaches more than 100 millions users globally across more than 200 countries, has commanded most of the attention. But the three-year-old Amazon Channels marketplace is perceived to be the more disruptive threat, at least by pay TV enthusiasts.

As pay TV operators have essentially recreated the traditional bundle in lower margin internet-protocol form with virtual MVPDs, Amazon Channels has innovated a brand new, a la carte method for distributing content.

CBS All Access became the latest subscription streaming service to distribute through Channels, which lets customers choose from a selection of more than 160 on-demand and live-streaming services, paying for them all in one centralized bill, directly to Amazon.

“Amazon has been absolutely amazing in terms of growing our subs,” CBS Corp. chairman and CEO Les Moonves said in revealing to investors a Channels partnership that had already been in the works. “They’ve been at the top of the list and we like what they’re doing.”

Amazon hasn’t released subscriber numbers for Channels. But speaking alongside Sappington at the May industry event, Kathy Payne, head of content acquisition for Amazon Prime Video Channels, said the program is serving “millions” of customers.

“What we have found is that consumers really love the product,” Payne said. “They’re tired of having contracts. They’re tired of having price increases. They’re tired of not feeling in control of what they’re buying and what they’re choosing.

“All of this is really being driven by the millennials, who have grown up in an a la carte world,” she added. “Customers really enjoy the flexibility of coming in and buying only what they want to watch.”

Catching Fire

Indeed, in terms of comparing Amazon’s global video business model, it’s probably as helpful to compare it to Roku, a device company, as it is Netflix.

According to Parks Associates data from late May, 28% of OTT consumers used an Amazon Fire TV streaming device, up from 24% last year and 16% in 2016. Amazon is still a ways behind market leader Roku, which controls 37% of the OTT device and connected TV business, Parks said.

Like Roku, Amazon is carving out deals with smart TV makers to integrate the Fire TV experience natively.

In devices — and in all things — Amazon speaks in tones of global domination, determined to have consumers watch a show it created, streamed by one of its services via a user experience controlled by and billed for by Amazon.

“In the U.S., U.K., Japan and Germany, we are No. 1, by far, in both sales and usage, regardless of what Roku might say,” Marc Whitten, who heads Amazon’s Fire TV business, said at CES in January.

YouTube TV, the over-the-top TV service launched more than a year ago, doesn’t have the most subscribers among the streaming crowd, but it appears to be leading the pack in terms of consumer sentiment.

That’s according to findings in Crimson Hexagon’s Consumer Electronics Report, which analyzed a massive pool of public social data. Crimson Hexagon estimates that its A.I.-powered insights engine carved out findings from more than 1 trillion posts of “consumer conversations and opinions” from a mix global sources, including social networks and enterprise-held data.

Crimson Hexagon, which uses that repository of data to help partners such as General Mills, Twitter, Adidas and Paramount Pictures get a fix on tracking brand perception and marketing campaign performance, found that YouTube TV generated the most positive consumer sentiment among the OTT services it tracked (74%), edging out Netflix, Hulu and HBO Now. PlayStation Vue and Sling TV — two rival OTT TV services — were shown to have more negative consumer sentiment.

Crimson Hexagon noted that YouTube TV was praised in part for having a relatively low ad load, while Netflix was given props for its broad catalog as well as its original series and shows.

Among the subscription video-on-demand crowd, Netflix’s “share of voice” dominated both Hulu and Amazon Video, according to Crimson Hexagon’s data pool.

The firm noted that the online discussion around streaming services has seen a meteoric rise. While that online conversation accounted for about 3 million posts in 2010, that number surged to 67 million in 2017.

The study also shed some light on consumer sentiment in the smart home arena, finding that the discussion has become increasingly positive since 2010, mirroring the growth of consumer adoptions. Smart lighting received the most positive attention in this category, followed by entertainment, home assistants, home heating and air conditioning control, and home security.

Amazon and Google were the top two smart home brands, trailed by Apple and Nest (which is part of Google).

Here’s some good news for the exploding SVOD arena – a greater number of consumers are paying for multiple OTT products.

RELATED: SVOD Surge (subscription required)

Some 19% of streaming subs were paying for three or more OTT services by the end of 2016, up four points from the previous year, according to a new survey from 451 Research.

The firm’s latest Voice of the Connected User Landscape study, based on a survey of 1,270 people in North America, said that increased adoption speaks to the rise of consumer self-bundling, led by Netflix and Amazon Video, with additions of services like Hulu and HBO Now.

Of those who pay for a streaming service, 79% said they subscribe to Netflix, and 53% get Amazon Video, which is up 5 points in the past year, 451 Research found.

Access to movies (50%) was tops among consumer drivers, followed by access to complete seasons of TV shows (45%), a figure that has jumped 6 points in a six-month period.

About 33% said they picked a streaming service based on original content, up 8 points year-over-year, with the importance of that element rising 9 points (to 36%) for Netflix subs, and up 14 points (36%) among Amazon Video users, the research firm found.

Per the survey, 31% of Amazon Video users said original fare is the most watched type of content on that service (up from just 7% two years ago), and 32% among Netflix subs (up from 20% two years ago).

“Netflix and Amazon have spent billions creating exclusive original content to differentiate themselves within a competitive streaming TV market, and our latest surveys show that it’s resonating with customers,” Andy Golub, managing director of 451 Research's Voice of the Connected User Landscape surveys and research, said in a statement. “Original content has become a much more important factor over the past year in choosing streaming services, and the data shows consumers are simply watching more of it.

The study found that 41% of those who own an OTT device have a Roku streaming player or streaming stick, followed by an Apple TV device (35%), a Google Chromecast adapter (26%), Amazon Fire TV Stick (13%) or an Amazon Fire TV box (10%).

Netflix may have a sizable subscriber lead on other SVOD services, but HBO Now beats them all when measured against more than a dozen categories linked to customer satisfaction, Strategy Analytics found in a study that also included Hulu and Amazon Video in its analysis.

RELATED: Netflix Ended 2016 With 93.8M Subs Worldwide

Per the report,  HBO Now, the direct-to-consumer OTT service that debuted in April 2015, ranked highest in 11 of 14 categories, including availability of past season TV shows, overall number of shows and original programs, hit movies, quality of original programming and movies.

Netflix was ranked tops in three categories – recommendations, cost of the service, and, most notably, overall satisfaction.

Hulu held the edge in children’s programming, and outscored Netflix in six of the 14 categories. Amazon Video did not score highest in any of the report’s 14 categories of measurement.

“HBO Now has successfully positioned itself as a go-to-service for quality programs, especially movies,” Zhaowen Wu, digital media strategies analyst at Strategy Analytics, said in a statement. “Though HBO Now has a much smaller library than other SVOD services, it has more blockbuster movie and hit series such as Game of Thrones and Westworld.”

“When considering the bigger picture, Netflix clearly benefits from its brand ‘halo’ whilst HBO Now suffers from a negative association with cable’s legacy issues, however, once one gets into the weeds, the reality is that HBO subscribers are the most satisfied with nearly all elements that make up a strong SVOD service,” added Michael Goodman, the research firm’s director, digital media strategies.

Goodman stressed that the difference in scores across most categories was relatively small, and that Amazon’s scores could be impacted because video is just one benefit included in a Prime subscription.

“People have been talking about it being a Netflix vs. Amazon battle in terms of which service viewers choose, with the others left to pick up the scraps. However, if HBO continues on this vein, we’re more likely to see a situation where people will have one ‘blockbuster’ service like HBO or HBO Now and either a Netflix or Amazon in support,” Goodman said. 

As the U.S. video streaming market shows signs of saturation, international expansion is becoming increasingly important for OTT players.

It’s a clear strategy point for Netflix, which expanded service to an additional 130 markets around the world back in January. And international expansion is apparently becoming a bigger focus for one of its chief SVOD rivals, Amazon.

Amazon is preparing to launch its Prime Video service in France, Spain and Italy before the end of 2016, according to Le Figaro. That would expand on the service’s reach in the U.S., as well as markets such as the U.K., Germany, and Japan, where Prime Video debuted last fall.

Amazon, which introduced a stand-alone SVOD option in April, has been asked to comment on the report. Amazon is scheduled to report Q2 2016 results on Thursday, July 28.

Though Netflix, Amazon and Hulu dominate the SVOD-OTT landscape in the U.S., the sector is showing signs of saturation, perhaps opening up opportunities for less-expensive, niche-focused offerings, according to Strategy Analytics.

Amazon Video said it has begun to stream titles in Dolby Vision High Dynamic Range, marking an expansion to its initial foray into HDR streaming last year.

While 4K video delivers more pixels, HDR supports brighter and more colorful pixels, which can be applied to 4K as well as HD video.

Titles currently available from Amazon Video in Dolby Vision HDR include Amazon original series Bosch (season 2), along with a batch of movies from Sony Pictures Entertainment, including After Earth, The Amazing Spiderman 2, The Smurfs 2, Chappie, Elysium, Fury, Hancock, and Pineapple Express, now offered for rent or purchase in the format.

Amazon noted that Prime members can stream titles in Dolby Vision and HDR 10 at no additional cost to their membership. HDR 10 content is supported by Amazon’s app on compatible Samsung, Sony and LG smart TVs, while Dolby Vision HDR titles are offered from  Amazon on compatible LG smart TVs.

Amazon noted that it plans to offer more than 150 hours of HDR content by the end of the year.

Netflix entered the HDR mix in April, announcing then that it would offer more than 100 hours of HDR programming by August, and more than 150 hours by the end of 2016. Comcast, meanwhile, plans to start shipping its first set-top with HDR capabilities, the Xi5, by July 4, ensuring its availability for the Rio Olympics, where NBCUniversal will be producing some coverage in the format.

Netflix’s new, more efficient encoding scheme has resulted in a decline in its traffic share on fixed broadband networks, but the OTT service remains the Internet’s dominant force by a wide margin, according to Sandvine's latest Global Internet Phenomena study.

The study, based on anonymous subscriber data collected by Sandvine in March 2016 from more than 300 service providers, found that Netflix represented 35.2% of traffic on North America fixed networks, a slight decrease from the 37.1% it represented when Sandvine issued its previous study in December 2015.

Netflix, which has about 46.97 million U.S. streaming subs and 34.53 million internationally, began to roll out its more tailored, title-by-title encoding approach late last yearand pivot away from its previous, fixed “one-size-fits all” bitrate ladder. Under the new approach, Netflix applies more bits when needed (in a movie or TV show with a lot of action scenes, for example) and less bits where they aren’t (such as in animation titles).

“It should be noted that at the time of collection, it was unclear if Netflix had re-encoded their entire library, so an update in the second half of this year may better reveal the impact Encode Optimization may have had on networks in the region,” the bandwidth management company noted in the study.

Other notable eaters of downstream data on North American fixed access networks included YouTube (17.53%), Amazon Video (4.26%), iTunes (2.91%), and Hulu (2.68%).

Sling TV, Dish’s OTT-TV service, accounted for less than 1% of peak downstream traffic, but, for the first time, was among the top 20 apps on most networks, Sandvine said. 

Netflix, at 32.72%, also led on aggregate bandwidth on fixed access networks in North America, followed by YouTube (17.31%). BitTorrent led the upstream category with 18.37%, compared to YouTube (13.13%) and Netflix (10.33%).

The story is different on the mobile front. YouTube (20.87%) was tops on the downstream on North American mobile access networks, compared to Facebook (13.97%) and Netflix (3.72%). Facebook absorbed the most upstream data on those mobile nets (14.85%), compared to YouTube (5.01%), Snapchat (4.36%), Instagram (3.35%) and BitTorrent (2.16%).

Sandvine said real-time entertainment remained the traffic category in the region, responsible for over 71% of downstream bytes during peak period, up from 70% in the last report.

With 4K streaming, high dynamic range (HDR) content and virtual reality expected to rise in adoption, Sandvine sees North America becoming the first region to see real-time entertainment surpass the 80% downstream traffic streaming threshold by the end of 2020. 

Get complete coverage of VR trends and technologies.

Indicating that it's poised to follow Netflix and Hulu into the VR world, Amazon, which also runs a subscription video streaming service, is on the hunt for some virtual reality expertise.

As spotted by UploadVR, this Glassdoor listing shows that Amazon is looking to hire a senior software development manager to “lead our Virtual Reality team.”

“The team is responsible for building the Virtual Reality experience within Amazon Video,” the post adds. “Entertainment is evolving rapidly. The future will not be limited to passive 2D experiences. The Virtual Reality team will explore and create the platform and interface for immersive storytelling. This will include an ingestion and playback platform for Virtual Reality experiences.”

Amazon hasn’t announced a specific VR initiative, but, from a competitive standpoint, it makes total sense that the company would want to strike while the iron’s hot.

The sector for VR and 360-video is ramping up and attracting lots of VC dollars. Meanwhile, Netflix has already booted up an app for the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR platform, and Hulu has one on the way.

Google, meanwhile, reportedly has some big VR plans that extend well beyond Cardboard, and there are rumblings that Apple is also looking to expand into virtual reality products.

And virtual reality clearly has Tim Cook’s attention. “No, I don’t think it’s a niche,” the Apple CEO said on the company’s recent Q1 call when asked about VR. “I think it can be…really cool and has some interesting applications.”

Amazon seems to agree. 

U.S. broadband users continue to gravitate to OTT services, threatening to saturate the market, but there’s still room to grow for several players in the sector, eMarketer found in a new forecast -- Q4 2015 State of Video: Monetization, Audience, Platforms and Content.

Led by usage of YouTube, about 72.1% of U.S. Internet subs, or 199.6 million of them, will tap into OTT video services by 2019, up from 69.7%/181 million at the end of 2015, the firm predicts.

In the bigger picture view, eMarketer believes there will be 187.8 million YouTube users in the U.S. by 2019, up from 170.7 million at the end of 2014. Likewise, the firm predicts there will be 143.0 million Netflix users in the U.S. by 2019, up from 114.3 million in 2015. By 2019, there will be 88.6 Amazon OTT users (versus 65.2 million this year), and 82.2 million Hulu users (up from 59.9 million in 2015).

Among that group, Hulu’s expected to see the greatest user growth (4.3%) by 2019, followed by Amazon (4.1%), Netflix (2.6%) and YouTube (1.6%).  By  2019, YouTube will maintain its lead from a user penetration standpoint (94.1%), ahead of Netflix (71.7%), Amazon (44.4%), and Hulu (41.2%).

“There is little if any room for YouTube to grow beyond this near saturation, but other leading services will undergo significant growth over the next several years,” eMarketer noted. The expected growth rate of other services, “indicate that US OTT usage is on a sharp growth trajectory, even factoring out YouTube.”

Among other predictions, eMarketer said 89.3% of U.S. digital viewers will watch video via OTT, up from 88.6% in 205.

And while game consoles will lead the connected TV category over smart TVs and Blu-ray players this year, their share will continue to erode, with streaming sticks – led by Google’s Chromecast – becoming the second-most pervasive connected TV device, eMarketer said.

Amazon is the latest streaming service to fly the friendly skies.

Timed with the start of the holiday travel season, the retailing giant announced last week that its  Amazon Video service is now offered on more than 150 JetBlue aircraft equipped with free “Fly-Fi” connectivity.

Under the arrangement, Amazon Prime subscribers can log-in to access their video library, including Amazon originals such as The Man in the High Castle, while non-members can rent or purchase titles from the Amazon Video store.

As part of a multiyear deal, Amazon on JetBlue has been integrated into The Hub, the airline’s entertainment portal that customers access on their personal devices.

JetBlue said it plans to complete its installation of Fly-Fi, a service that uses Ka-band satellite technology, on its entire fleet in 2016. JetBlue currently has it installed on all its Airbus A320 and A321 aircraft, and has begun installation on its fleet of Embraer 190s.

Access to Amazon Video complement’s JetBlue’s offer of 36 channels of live DirecTV service and 100-plus channels of SiriusXM Satellite Radio.

Amazon, which recently introduced an option that lets Prime subs download select titles from their streaming libraries for offline viewing, joins a growing mix of OTT services that provide access on planes.

Netflix, which has shunned the video download distribution model, offers its SVOD service on select Virgin America flights. In the more traditional pay TV arena, Comcast and Epix are among those that let credentialed subscribers download movies and TV shows for offline viewing.