Amazon’s little multi-billion-dollar side hustle, Prime Video, is having a very good couple of weeks, for those who may have missed the cavalcade of news out of the company lately.
Prime’s biggest originals swing yet, The Wheel of Time, ended up being the most “in-demand” show of 2021 in the United States, according to new Parrot Analytics data. Like other third-party analytics companies, Parrot doesn’t have access to actual streaming viewership data, but tracks and compares shows based on other data, in this case all the different ways fans talk about shows across social media, blogs, news stories, reviews, and other outlets.
By Parrot’s accounting, Wheel attracted more than 43 times the audience interest of an average show over the first 30 days after its Nov. 19 debut. That beefy launch helped push Amazon Prime Video past Disney Plus for Q4’s second-biggest share of U.S. audience demand (8.9%) among all streaming services, though still well behind Netflix, (43.6%). Wheel also was No. 1 globally for eight days, Amazon’s first global hit in more than a year.
“As The Wheel of Time showed in Q4, one hit series can be enough for a streaming service to move the needle and jump up a position in this tightly contested race, and be the difference between a consumer deciding to add or drop an SVOD” service, Parrot analyst Wade Payson-Denney wrote.
That can matter a lot in a tight race for, ahem, primacy in viewers’ minds (2.7 percentage points separated Nos. 2 through 6) as they weigh how many services to pay for, Payson-Denny wrote. Wheel’s success will only fuel the arms race for high-profile projects across the industry.
Wheel was built around a sturdy base, spending nine figures to translate Robert Jordan’s series of fantasy novels to the screen with Rosamund Pike turning in an ethereal yet tough lead performance. Speaking of nine-figure investments, Amazon’s looking forward to its similarly minded The Lord of the Rings spinoff, The Rings of Power, to drive even more attention later this year.
The company also just debuted the first season of its take on a different kind of iconic book character, Jack Reacher, in a surprisingly compelling translation of Lee Child’s long-running series of crime novels.
Also read: ‘Reacher’ Gets Second Season on Amazon Prime
Reacher stars a mammoth Alan Ritchson and received such a strong response (Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it 85%, fans 92%) that Amazon quickly ordered a second season. That locks in a nice bookend to its Jack Ryan action franchise (whose season three has wrapped production and season four is already ordered).
Somewhat overlooked, despite getting even more critical and fan love, was the debut of adult animated hit The Legend of Vox Machina. The show started a decade ago as a bunch of voice-actor pals gathering for weekly sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, streaming hours at a time on Twitch and YouTube before spawning a record Kickstarter campaign for an animated spinoff.
Amazon snapped up two seasons, and commissioned animation powerhouse Titmouse (Big Mouth, Amazon’s The Boys: Diabolical) to make it happen. The show features the original voice actors in roles they created playing games, and smaller roles by notables such as David Tennant, Indira Varma, Dominic Monaghan, Felicia Day, and Tony Hale. Vox Machina has become an even bigger Rotten Tomatoes hit (100% critics, 93% audiences.
This week, the company saw its Being the Ricardos feature grab three Oscar nominations for actors Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, and J.K. Simmons, along with a hair and makeup nod for Coming 2 America. The Aaron Sorkin project about TV pioneers Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had its detractors, but the nominations suggest quite a lot worked (also worth noting: 12 of the 20 acting Oscar nominations this year went to projects from streaming services).
For those catching up ahead of the Oscars next month, you might also want to check out Lucy and Desi, the fine Amy Poeher-directed documentary about the couple that just debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. It hits Amazon on March 4, and provides a more comprehensive and fact-based context to Sorkin’s highly compressed fictional narrative.
It’s also possible Amazon will have even more Oscar bounty to celebrate, should it be able to close its $8.5 billion deal for MGM. The historic studio’s 2021 projects earned eight Oscar nominations, including best picture, director and original screenplay for Paul Thomas Anderson's semi-autobiographical comedy Licorice Pizza. The latest James Bond film, No Time to Die, as well as House of Gucci and Cyrano received nominations in lesser categories. Those could all be part of Amazon soon.
Amid all this, Amazon’s parent company has been doing some pretty good business too in the months since founder Jeff Bezos turned the CEO reins over to Andy Jassy.
In its Q4 earnings announcement last week, Amazon said it doubled net income, blowing out analyst estimates. The company also broke out for the first time, the money it generates from advertising, some $31 billion in revenue last year, making it third in the U.S. ad sector behind only Google and Facebook.
“It had been the majority of ‘Other’ revenue,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said, about where the ad funds had previously been classified “We’re very happy with ad growth. It continues to drive value.”
Despite the generally good news, Amazon shares have been relatively flat, sitting almost exactly halfway between their one-year peak and trough. The last of the tech giants to report Q4, Amazon appears to have been dinged by investors in something of a halo effect after the disastrous numbers reported by Facebook/Meta and Netflix.
Amazon this week took a major behind-the-scenes step to produce even more content. It signed a long-term lease at Pinewood Group's Shepperton Studios in London, providing the company’s first UK home base (It already has built a massive production facility in Culver City, near Sony Pictures and studios for Apple TV Plus and HBO). Netflix will be a close neighbor at Shepperton, where it too has locked up long-term access to increasingly scarce Class A studio facilities for its European productions.
And that UK home base for Amazon will be huge, with 450,000 square feet, nine sound stages, workshops, and offices, plenty of room for projects like the second season of The Rings of Power, as well as next shows from Good Omens creator Neil Gaiman, Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Small Axe maker Steve McQueen.
Amid all this, perhaps it’s no surprise Amazon felt confident about boosting the price of its Amazon Prime subscription, by $20 to $139 a year, or by $2 to $14.99 monthly. Prime includes not only that sweet, sweet free shipping, but a monthly free digital book, a music-streaming service, free video game assets and titles, and much else.
As the Motley Fool put it, “Nobody likes it when bills go up. But while Amazon Prime's price hike certainly isn't something to celebrate, don't be too quick to cancel or forgo a membership because of that increase. Chances are, you'll find that Prime more than pays for itself even at a higher cost.”
Add in a string of high-profile projects like The Wheel of Time, Reacher, Vox Machina, some Oscar glitter and more, and it’s easy to see why Jassy and his team felt comfortable bumping annual subscription prices by about the same amount as the monthly fee for Netflix’s most expensive tier.
As Amazon shapes into a far more formidable programmer, it has to be stirring growing dismay among competitors who are still tweaking their own streaming strategies.
