Amazon Working on Live TV Services
Amazon may be planning to boost its Prime Video service with live TV, which is known for its on-demand video offerings, as per a Protocol report and openly available job listings. Details are not disclosed yet about what the new live TV services might involve, though it looks to be in their early stages.
One job listing reads Amazon is looking for somebody who can "redefine how customers watch 24/7 linear broadcast TV content." That person will also be assigned a task with "designing the end-to-end customer experience for how customers discover and watch Linear TV content." (Linear TV is one more way to describe live TV, what you get to watch on a broadcast channel.) The Prime Video team is also seemingly "building next-gen linear catalogue systems to provide best-in-class Linear TV experience to Prime Video customers," says as per another job listing.
As per Protocol Amazon is "actively pursuing" licensing deals for live and linear programming.
This wouldn't be Amazon's first venture into live programming. Amazon has presented NFL Thursday Night Football games on Prime Video and Twitch for a few years, and due to an extension signed in April, the two companies will continue their partnership. Last week, Amazon made an announcement that it would begin streaming Premier League soccer on Twitch beginning from June 29th. But these recent job listings and Protocol's report propose that Amazon is planning to take its live TV desires further by offering 24/7 service.
Other companies also tried their hands on offering live TV with variable degrees of success. Currently, YouTube offers YouTube TV, which gives access to many broadcast channels, at $49.99 per month. Hulu also has a similar service that begins at $54.99 per month. But both of these services increased prices since launch — recently YouTube TV's price went up in April 2019, while Hulu's last raised in December. And in January Sony shut down its live TV service PlayStation Vue after operating it from March 2015 in part since "the highly competitive Pay TV industry, with expensive content and network deals, has been slower to change than we expected."