Amazon’s Streaming-Video Point Man Evasive in His HDR Answers

Paull spent large chunks of his 40-minute conference keynote interview extolling the success of Amazon’s Streaming Partners program, launched in December, that allows Prime members to add Showtime, Starz and dozens more SVOD services to their Prime membership at slight discounts (see 1512080052). But Paull was neither asked nor did he say anything on stage about extending Amazon's HDR capabilities to Streaming Partners content and was evasive in his answers when we asked him about HDR afterward.

Whether Amazon will offer streamed HDR content through the Streaming Partners platform “will be based on what our partners are doing,” Paull told us. “We have the technical capability to do so,” but Amazon doesn’t yet offer HDR content through the platform, he said. Paull answered with an “I don’t know” when we asked if an HDR offering through Streaming Partners would debut this year. On whether Amazon will commit to offering capability for Dolby Vision video streaming, as Netflix has committed to do (see 1604190018), Paull said: “We’re not commenting on that yet.”

Streaming Partners allows “third-party services and channels to get access to our platform as well as our highly engaged customer base,” Paull said in the keynote. “So if you look at what we’ve accomplished over the past several years, we’ve built up a very large, highly engaged group of people who are watching and streaming video on their various connected devices. We’ve invested significantly in technology in order to support a wide variety of devices.”

Amazon also invested “a lot of time and resources in building a best-in-class capability to stream video to all of these devices in a very reliable way,” Paull said. “There was a time when digital video was a sort of complement to your primary TV-viewing experience,” but now, “it’s becoming a major component of it,” he said. "I still remember in the early days of cable when the cable would go out, or it would get bad, and you were OK with that experience. But it’s been a very long time for any of us to have our cable go out, unless there was some major weather issue, or get some really bad reception. People have grown to expect that their TV works, and as we’re moving from QAM to IP, consumers have that same expectation.”

Amazon has “a lot of assets at our disposal” to promote the “right shows” to the “right people” in its “highly engaged user base,” Paull said. “As we’re bringing these third-party services onto our platform” through the Streaming Partners initiative, “I’m able to use that data of people’s consumption behavior in order to say, ‘These are the shows that I should be promoting to you,’” he said. “And interestingly, it’s working.” Paull cited the April 9 debut through Streaming Partners of the second season of the Starz series Outlander. “I was able to actually use our ecosystem and use our data in a way where we could help stand up that show within our ecosystem, and the results of that show have been tremendous,” he said. “The consumption of the show has been very high, and we got an enormous number of sign-ups to Starz through our platform.”

Paull doesn’t spend a lot of time “worrying” about the subscriber churn rates of its Streaming Partners platform, he said. “In my mind, once you have the consumer -- even if the intent is I’m going to binge-watch a show and then exit -- if you use the data, and present other shows that they want to watch, they’ll stay,” he said. “If there’s nothing else for them to enjoy, then, yes, they will churn out. But I think as programmers, our job is to make sure that people are getting value for the money they are spending.” Streaming Partners has more than 30 SVOD services, “and we expect to launch dozens more in the coming months,” he said. “So you’re going to see a lot of services coming onto the platform this year.” Paull wouldn’t say whether Amazon has plans to expand Streaming Partners internationally.