Original movies and TV shows from Amazon Prime Video are about to get a lot more accessible.
Amazon says that it will take 100 Amazon Originals from its Prime Video SVOD service and make them available on Freevee this year. Among the projects making the move to Amazon’s free ad-supported streaming service are The Wheel of Time, Reacher, A League of Their Own, The Grand Tour, Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, Modern Love, and others.
Some shows, like The Wheel of Time, will make their debut timed to drum up interest ahead of upcoming seasons on the subscription Prime Video, while other older shows will be more widely accessible on Freevee.
Many shows are available as of today, with The Summer I Tuned Pretty joining May 26, and other shows including The Wheel of Time and Reacher being added later in the year. The shows will remain ad-free on Prime Video.
In conjunction with the move, the Freevee Originals FAST channel has been rebranded as the Amazon Originals channel, including both Freevee originals like Jury Duty, and Prime Video originals like the aforementioned shows.
The move by Amazon underscores how premium streaming players are rethinking their streaming strategies in what has become a complex operating environment. In the case of Amazon, which owns the widely-distributed free service Freevee alongside its more premium Prime Video offering, the move can serve to potentially drive interest to the premium tier from consumers who maybe haven’t given it a try.
It also serves to more effectively monetize programming that has already been bought and paid for, this time leveraging advertising to help it do so. Amazon is hosting its newfront presentation to advertisers at New York’s Lincoln Center Monday night.
Already HBO Max has taken some library programming, including Westworld and The Nevers, and packaged it in a bundle that it sold to FAST operators Roku and Tubi. Warner Bros. Discovery is also pursuing its own FAST offering, similar to Freevee, where it can use some of its library shows and films.
While neither Disney nor Netflix have indicated any imminent plans to sell some fo their shows to a free ad-supported streamer just yet (neither company has one in-house as of now), with Wall Street looking to see profitability in streaming, it is not out of the question.
