By careful licensing of studio archive content, Amazon’s IMDB TV has put together a free service that consumers rank on an equal footing with major SVoD platforms, a factor that could be a key driver for the uptake of nascent Advertising-supported Video-on-Demand (AVoD) services. Launched in January 2019, IMDB TV offers over 1,000 titles to consumers in the US, split evenly between Movies and TV Seasons. 

While the service does not compare with the very largest SVoD players—Netflix and Hulu in particular have more recent, larger, higher-quality content offerings—it has slotted in as a free competitor to a number of broadcaster-led SVoD platforms and adds an interesting new cog to the wider Amazon streaming strategy which now includes subscription content on Prime, Video Direct and Amazon Channels.

As of July 2019, IMDb TV's catalogue was comparable in quality, quantity and recency to CBS All Access and Starz Play, each of which has slightly over 4m paying subscribers. This competitiveness is backed up by early indications from Ampere's Q3 2019 Consumer survey in the US - which suggest that IMDb TV is currently used each month by just under 1.5% of the US population (1.68m homes).

IMDb TV relies on a mixture of two key content types: a large quantity of older, high-quality titles from the libraries of major studios; and a small number of newer, high profile recent releases from the past five years, such as La La Land, A Monster Calls and The Bachelor. For those studios that have not centred fully around direct-to-consumer strategies, IMDb TV provides a flexible means of distributing higher-quality, older content, outside of wider deals for more recent movies and TV series. Sony is responsible for high proportion of the most popular, highest-profile movie content, with a number of older titles such as The Karate Kid, Jerry Maguire and A Knight's Tale; Warner Bros has made available a number of key TV series, including The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Fringe and The Middle; while a range of content from Paramount and Lionsgate is also available on the service. 

For Amazon, which currently packages IMDb TV as a channel within its Prime Video offering, the service fills several strategic goals. First, it potentially increases Prime Video's reach to a wider audience of consumers, that do not wish to pay to consume VoD. Amazon's VoD strategy to date has centred on offering consumers a wide range of different ways to view content, either via aggregation, subscription or transaction, and its IMDb TV play now also offers an outlet for free, ad-supported content. Secondly, it provides a flexible platform to aggregate a wide range of older, high-quality studio content. Amazon's Video Direct service has previously tried to offer studios similar functionality in several markets, essentially enabling studios to upload library titles on a "pay-as-you-play" licensing model, but has had challenges with content getting lost in the wider Prime Video catalogue. Finally, it leverages its global IMDb brand— particularly for movies, where IMDb is often used for recommendation—while slotting the IMDb TV service into Amazon's existing channel aggregation play.