Amazon is retiring its Freevee service, it’s been announced, as it seeks to bolster its main Prime Video streaming platform.
Against the backdrop of streaming services wanting a slice of your income every month, there’s also been the quiet rise of those happy to give you things for free – albeit in exchange for watching adverts. In an era where streamers have prioritised listing movies and TV shows that their numbers indicate give them some sort of response, these free services have picked up the slack and given us a deeper catalogue of stuff to browse through.
Tubi is one such service, and Ryan’s found a whole host of genre films available on it here. But Amazon also has offered Freevee – formerly known as IMDb Freedive, then IMDb TV – a useful option that’s offered films and shows for no upfront charge.
Earlier this year, however, Amazon itself started offering adverts on its Prime Video service, requiring users to pay a premium. As part of the broader efforts of the company presumably to streamline its advertising sales, it’s now confirmed that Freevee is being retired in the coming weeks.
The plus side to this is apparently, all the films and TV shows that were previously available under the Freevee banner are moving to the Prime Video service instead.
As Amazon explained in corporate speak to Deadline, “we have built Prime Video into a first-stop entertainment destination where customers can personalize their viewing experience by streaming exclusive Prime member entertainment produced by Amazon MGM Studios, licensed movi…”. No, that’s getting boring. Let’s get to the meat of it. “To deliver a simpler viewing experience for customers, we have decided to phase out Freevee branding. There will be no change to the content available for Prime members, and a vast offering of free streaming content will still be accessible for non-Prime members, including select Originals from Amazon MGM Studios, a variety of licensed movies and series, and a broad library of FAST Channels”.
It’s more an indicator of the moving wheels of streaming than anything that ultimately affects what we watch. The key impact for us on our side of the fence is that finding things via the Freevee carousel was a bit easier than everything being lumped together (Prime Video is one of the hardest services to find what you want to watch on, I’d argue, if it’s not one of the top 500 films or shows). Still, we’re not actually losing anything here, so I’ll take it.
