Amazon expands Amazon Channels to UK, Germany, taking aim at pay-TV users

Ingrid Lunden
@ingridlunden /

Image Credits:

The race to control the TV is on, and today comes some news out of Europe underscoring Amazon’s ambitions in that department. The e-commerce giant announced the launch of Amazon Channels in the UK and Germany — its two biggest markets in the region — which will see Amazon, for the first time, offer close to 50 live and on-demand streamed channels to the region as part of its Amazon Prime service.

This is not just the first time that Amazon will offer live TV in Europe, tapping into what remains the most popular format for TV viewing in the region, despite the insurgence of on-demand content via the internet. Notably, Amazon Channels will be the first time that many popular channels like Discovery will be available for people to pay for and watch without subscribing to a larger, more expensive bundle of channels through a pay-TV provider like Sky or BT.

In other words, this will let Amazon squarely target consumers who are tired of paying high monthly premiums and are considering “cord-cutting.” Prices for each channel on Amazon Channels will range from £1.49/month to £9.49/month, with many coming in at around £3.99-£4.99.

We asked, but Amazon declined to specify what the business model is for Amazon Channels, if it gets a percentage from each subscription and what that might be. (As a point of comparison, Apple takes 30 percent on in-app purchases, but only 15 percent when those purchases are subscriptions.)

“For the first time, Prime members in the UK and Germany will be able to choose to watch premium TV channels without having to sign up to a bundle or a contract, giving them the freedom to pay for only what they want to watch,” said Alex Green, MD, Europe, Amazon Channels, in a statement. “From live sport to Bollywood, art house cinema to reality TV, and award-winning TV shows from popular channels like Discovery and ITV, Amazon Channels gives power back to customers to choose exactly what they want to watch.”

While cord cutting has been a pretty significant theme in the U.S. market, in the U.K. and Germany there have been precious few options for people to pick and choose what they want to watch, with most people instead getting tied into large packages, or taking nothing at all.

Amazon Prime, for background, is the company’s all-in-one subscription (£7.99/month or £5.99/month for just video in the UK; €8.99/month or €7.99/month for video in Germany), and as in the U.S., Amazon throws in lots of things to tie people into paying for it each month and using Amazon for their various shopping needs. These days, this includes free and fast shipping, and entertainment like Amazon Music and Prime Video.

And as with other Amazon video services — and unlike some others like Apple TV — there is no shortage of ways to consume Amazon Channels. You will be able to access Amazon Channels via Amazon’s Prime Video app, as well as the Amazon Video app on smart TVs, iOs and Android mobile devices; Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, and Fire tablets; games consoles; and finally through the good old world wide web. (Oh, and if you believe the reports, possibly through Apple TV soon, too.)

This is a somewhat slow rollout of Amazon Channels, which first launched in the U.S. back in 2015 with the significantly less catchy title of Amazon Streaming Partners. It comes on the heels of Amazon already offering a sizeable number of titles on demand either directly or through third-party partners.

Launching Amazon Channels in Europe, in contrast, gives Amazon a direct line for providing content itself. It follows a number of other moves that Amazon has been making in the areas of video, entertainment and TV. These include:

While other new players in the TV arena like Facebook and Twitter have secured deals in sports broadcasts in recent times, we have yet to hear of anything from Amazon. I say watch this space… literally and figuratively.

Notably, the launch of Amazon Channels today includes the Eurosport channel, which already broadcasts coverage of the French Open tennis tournament and the Tour de France bicycle race (a personal favorite of mine).

The Eurosport launch, and the bigger Amazon Channels move, both highlight an important point, perhaps just as significant as Amazon’s obvious strategy to keep adding more services to Prime to attract more subscribers (a strategy it’s been following for years now).

By offering Amazon Channels, it’s giving the company — a veritable vacuum and conjurer when it comes to big data — a direct line to being able to observe what it is that people like to watch. This, in turn, will help Amazon itself build up ideas for what areas it can move into next — be it securing sports rights, ideas for what original content it might want to produce next, or perhaps deciding what to try to sell to you.

On the part of broadcasters, having Amazon wade into the TV fray with Amazon Channels is probably coming just at the right time. Companies like ITV — a commercial, terrestrial channel that is the largest broadcaster in the UK in terms of overall weekly viewers — have long been looking for ways of boosting its numbers and recapturing more users who have turned away from traditional, linear TV and now opt to watch video on demand on their tablets or computers, or TVs connected to the internet.

“The ITV Hub is all about giving viewers more choice about how and when they access their favourite ITV shows, including watching without the ads via ITV Hub+ for £3.99 per month,” said Simon Pitts, ITV Managing Director, Online, Pay and Interactive, in a statement. “We’re delighted to be part of the Amazon Channels launch line-up in the UK.”

While pay-TV companies have long held the upper hand when it comes to offering consumers these channels and the on-demand components behind them, now the broadcasters will have one more way to bypass this and stand apart from noisy bundles.

“We are delighted to bring our premium factual and sports content to Amazon Prime members. This partnership underlines our strategic ambition to reach people across every screen,” Susanna Dinnage, president of Discovery Networks UK and chief content officer, international, said in a statement. “Amazon Prime members can now experience the shows that are loved by Discovery fans as well as enjoy an exciting summer of sport which is about to kick off on the Eurosport Player.”

I’ll be looking forward to seeing just how well this is used. If it’s up to Amazon, as with so many other sales and audience figures in its wider product universe, I’m not expecting to see any hard numbers for viewing, although hopefully this will get picked up by some of the analytics firms who track TV viewing.

Below is the full run-down of channels in the UK. For those of you interested in the German list, you can find that here.

Latest Stories

How Rubrik’s IPO paid off big for Greylock VC Asheem Chandna

Marina Temkin
3:36 pm PDT • April 26, 2024

Photo-sharing community EyeEm will license users’ photos to train AI if they don’t delete them

Sarah Perez
2:08 pm PDT • April 26, 2024

Meta AI tested: Doesn’t quite justify its own existence, but free is free

Devin Coldewey
1:03 pm PDT • April 26, 2024

So are we banning TikTok or what? Also: Can an influencer really tank an $800M company?

Haje Jan Kamps
12:05 pm PDT • April 26, 2024

The IBM-HashiCorp coupling could be more complicated than it seems

Ron Miller
10:39 am PDT • April 26, 2024

Curio raises funds for Rio, an ‘AI news anchor’ in an app

Sarah Perez
10:36 am PDT • April 26, 2024