Prime Video Received Over 10,000 Customer Complaints in 2023 Due to Video Integrity Errors
Missing episodes, inaccurate translations and similar problems are a big problem for Prime Video under the surface, internal documents show.
Netflix is the only streaming service in the United States that can fairly claim to have a larger subscriber base than Prime Video. Amazon’s streaming platform has more than 200 million global customers, but a subscriber base that size must necessarily come with a few complaints. More than a few, as it turns out; Business Insider recently acquired internal Amazon documents which show that thousands of customers have complained about its mistake-plagued library, with errors like incomplete TV seasons and incorrect translations leading to cancelations as well as protests from customers.
- BI reports that 60% of all content-related complaints about Prime Video in 2023 were catalog errors.
- Amazon received nearly 10,000 “customer friction reports” about TV season integrity over the year.
- Errors can lead to viewership on affected titles dropping off 20% more often than error-free shows and movies.
Each streaming platform with thousands of shows and movies in its library is bound to see a few errors in a show description or its metadata. There are simply too many lines of code to keep up with for viewers to expect absolute perfection, but Amazon’s internal documents obtained by Business Insider show the company is not simply dismissing these problems.
The documents show that 60% of all content-related customer experience complaints in 2023 were due to errors in Prime Video’s streaming catalog. “Season integrity,” a category that includes incomplete TV seasons with missing episodes, wrong content availability, and related issues accounted for nearly 10,000 of what Amazon calls “customer friction reports” last year. Shows with incorrect localized display pages — pages designed to highlight shows in specific regions — can see 20% more engagement drop-offs than shows with pages that display without errors.
The report indicates that Amazon is also conscious of numerous errors that crop up when trying to localize content for specific regions on Prime Video. Issues like incorrect translations into native languages and incorrect artwork on show display pages continue to plague the streamer.
“There is a general ‘sense’ that our localization is subpar…These are difficult to detect due to lack of in-house expertise” in languages appropriate for specific regions, one of the Amazon documents says.
Prime Video’s expansion of its content production slate in India shows how important its international customers are to the company, so fixing issues related to translations and other problems that arrive when adapting content to specific regions will be key for the company.
How is Amazon Planning to Fix These Issues?
The documents obtained by BI show that Amazon is moving to remedy the issues that are causing so many customer complaints. A “human-led language expertise program to scale sourcing of language experts for a wide set of languages” should help it in localizing its content, and the company estimates this could eliminate as many as 15,000 error reports from customers every year.
The company also wants to create new software to aid it in identifying problems with season integrity. It is also considering the creation of new, internal metrics that will help it measure the “completeness” of its vast streaming catalog.
It’s highly likely that Amazon’s executives are none too thrilled with the publicizing of these documents, which makes its streamer seem uniquely riddled with errors. It’s a stark contrast to reporting surrounding the integration of Hulu titles onto Disney+, a technical undertaking that required big changes to the company's streaming metadata. Disney has seemingly pulled off that feat without problems of season integrity cropping up the way they do on Prime Video.
The internal documents do not specify how many customers Prime Video has lost thanks to its error-riddled library, but the company is likely not seeing a huge churn reaction. Many Prime Video customers are receiving the platform as an ancillary benefit of their Amazon Prime subscriptions, and there’s little reason to throw away all of those benefits because of a streaming title mistake or a missing episode here and there. But Amazon takes these problems quite seriously and is working hard to ensure they improve the quality of Prime Video’s library.
Amazon Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video is a subscription video streaming service that includes on-demand access to 10,000+ movies, TV shows, and Prime Originals like “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” “Jack Ryan,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The Boys,” and more. Subscribers can also add third-party services like Max, Showtime, STARZ, and dozens more with Amazon Prime Video Channels. Prime Video also offers exclusive live access to NFL Thursday Night Football.