In Amazon’s annual letter to shareholders, the company’s president and CEO Andy Jassy addressed a number of important issues for the company from the pandemic’s impact on their business to revenue increases to worker health and safety. The letter also included a section specifically about Prime Video that not only chronicled the platform’s history, but also provided a small glimpse as to what the future could hold for the streamer.
In discussing the evolution from a service that allowed subscribers to download approximately 1,000 movies back in 2006 under the name Amazon Unbox to the award-winning streaming service that is Prime Video today, Jassy centered much of his comments on innovation.
“Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about producing compelling entertainment with memorable moments and using machine learning and other inventive technology to provide a superior-quality streaming experience,” he said, “with useful, relevant data about actors, TV shows, movies, music, or sports stats a click away in our unique X-Ray feature.”
The CEO also discussed how this innovative approach to streaming has been why an increasing number of sports leagues — most notably the NFL — have wanted to bring an increasing number of their games to Amazon.
Jassy noted that when Prime Video’s “Thursday Night Football” becomes “the NFL’s first weekly, prime time, streaming-only broadcast,” Amazon will continue to bring the unique presentation approach that users have become accustomed to across series and movies to sports.
But despite all of the innovations that have allowed Prime Video to become the country’s second-largest streaming service, Jassy believes that the service will only continue to evolve and innovate in the future.
“While there is so much progress in Prime Video from where we started,” he said, “we have more invention in front of us in the next 15 years than the last 15—and our team is passionately committed to providing customers with the most expansive collection of compelling content anywhere in the world.”
In an interview on CNBC Thursday morning, Jassy continued touting the future of his company’s streaming service.
“It’s still pretty early days for us in entertainment,” he said. “We’ve invested a lot of money and resources, and I think you should expect that we’ll continue to do so, we see a lot of opportunity there.”
TBD