Amazon Announced Its Streaming Partners Program
A Look at Amazon's Streaming Partners Program
Streaming Partners Program
On December 8, 2015, Amazon (AMZN) announced the Streaming Partners Program, an OTT (over-the-top) “streaming subscription program.” Under this program, Amazon partnered with around 20 media companies, including CBS (CBS), Showtime, Starz, and A+E Network.
The new service will be available exclusively to Amazon Prime members. An Amazon Prime membership costs $99 per year or $8.25 per month. The Streaming Partners Program provides viewers with free trial subscriptions for all its Streaming Partners.
Some of the content partners in this program, including Showtime and Starz, are also offering special pricing for Prime members. A Showtime and Starz subscription will be available at a special price for Prime members for $8.99 per month in addition to the price of Amazon’s Prime membership.
Other features
According to Amazon’s announcement of the Streaming Partners Program, other features for viewers include:
“Latest episodes available simultaneous with broadcast
Convenience of one account
One Watchlist across all subscriptions
Self-service cancellation of any subscription at anytime
IMDb X-Ray integration
Unified search and browse across subscriptions
Unified voice search and ASAP on Fire TV”
It remains to be seen how this new OTT service from Amazon will be received by its Prime members. In the next part of this series, we will explore why Amazon launched the Streaming Partners Program.
Amazon makes up 6.07% of the PowerShares QQQ Trust Series 1 ETF (QQQ). QQQ has a 4.4% exposure to the Television & Radio sector. QQQ also holds 8.43% of Microsoft (MSFT) and 5.01% of Alphabet (GOOG).
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