Amazon may be planning to beef up its Prime Video service, which is primarily known for its video-on-demand offerings, with live TV, according to a report by Protocol and publicly available job listings. Details are clear about what the new live TV services might entail, although the efforts appear to be in their early stages.
A job listing says Amazon is looking for someone who can “redefine the way customers view linear streaming TV content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” That person will also be assigned the task of “designing the customer experience from start to finish how customers discover and watch linear TV content.” (Linear television is another way of describing live television, such as what you might see on a broadcast channel.) The Prime Video team is also apparently “building next-generation linear catalog systems to provide the best linear TV experience for Prime Video customers.” Says another job advertisement.
Amazon is “actively seeking” license agreements for live and linear programming, according to Protocol.
This would not be Amazon’s first foray into live programming. Amazon has offered the NFL Thursday night soccer games on Prime Video and Twitch for a few years, and the two companies will continue their partnership thanks to an extension signed in April. And Amazon announced last week that it would start streaming Premier League football on Twitch starting June 29. But these recent job listings and ProtocolThe report suggests that Amazon is looking to take its live TV ambitions much further by offering some form of 24/7 service.
Other companies have attempted to offer live TV with varying degrees of success. YouTube currently offers YouTube TV, which gives you access to many streaming channels, for $ 49.99 per month. Hulu has a similar service that starts at $ 54.99 per month. But both services have had to raise prices since their launch: YouTube TV’s price most recently rose in April 2019, while Hulu’s last rose in December. And Sony closed its PlayStation Vue live TV service in January after operating it since March 2015, in part because “the highly competitive pay TV industry, with expensive content and network offerings, has changed more slowly than we expected.” .
Amazon has not responded to a request for comment.
