Amazon’s Prime Video has been on a European content deal spree this week. Earlier on Wednesday, it unveiled carriage partnerships with M6+ in France and RTVE in Spain, providing members there with additional programming, including current affairs, sports and entertainment, for free.
And on Tuesday, it announced multiyear carriage agreements offering HBO Max as an add-on subscription in Italy, Germany, and Austria.
Other key recent channel launches include the likes of ITV+ in the U.K., RTL+ in Germany, French soccer streamer Ligue 1+ in France and the U.K., Viaplay in the Netherlands, SkyShowtime in Spain, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden, as well as Apple TV+ across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Colombia.
Andrew Bennett took over as vp, Prime Video Europe, as of the start of 2025. Late last year, he was promoted to overseeing all partnerships, distribution, and strategy across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Latin America regions under the newtitleof vp, international partnerships, strategy & operations.
Bennett talked to The Hollywood Reporter about the partnerships push, why content deals help Prime Video and its partners, and what lies ahead.
What’s behind the slew of deals we have seen from Prime Video in recent days?
As a business, we are fully committed to the strategy of being a destination that aggregates our first-party SVOD service, third-party channels, and transactional video on demand (TVOD). We’re starting to see more and more partners recognize the value of distributing on Prime Video. And it’s happened at different paces in different regions. It’s about partners getting comfortable with the idea of distributing outside of traditional linear channels and working with streamers like ourselves.
They see opportunities for mutually accretive partnerships, where we can extend their reach, potentially onto new devices, to new customers, etc. And we’re starting to see really good engagement, both from customers on the existing channels, but also from partners getting more comfortable with this model.
HBO Max is offering its service as a Prime Video add-on as part of its launch in Italy, Germany and some more markets, while also extending existing deals in the likes of France, Spain, and Sweden. Is that a sign that both companies have seen benefits from existing arrangements?
It sometimes takes time. Here in Europe, for example, it’s taken some time for HBO Max to work through its distribution strategy. They had existing partners, and now they’re going direct to consumer. And it’s great that they’ve seen enough success with us in other markets that they’re extending that into Italy and Germany.
Turning to M6+ and RTVE, what kind of benefit do you see from offering free-to-air broadcasters’ programming to Prime Video customers?
The kind of programming that a lot of the free-to-air partners have is really broad. It’s news, sports, reality, etc. Obviously, they also have their own originals and movies, but the core of their offering is super-relevant to broad segments of the population of any country.
In France, M6+, for example, is going to have the [soccer] World Cup and the Super Bowl. Having the World Cup in any country for us, particularly in a free-to-air experience, is just great, because it’s great for customers. I think that is a really good sweet spot, combining broad, compelling programming with our ability to expand its reach.
So the deals this week are more of what you and your partners want? And how do you decide whether to offer partners’ content as an add-on or for free?
They fit the mantra we have around aggregating as much as possible on behalf of customers. We know that selection is what really matters. Just watching the Golden Globes this weekend, having known about the HBO Max deals, they bring the likes of The Pitt, Hacks, The White Lotus, The Last of Us, and more. If you love movies and TV shows, being able to add services like this is just really exciting.
When it comes to pricing and how we think about it, it is about being able to be competitive with what’s available on other devices. So if something is available for free, that’s what we’re going to do. We want there to be the same exact experience in our app. We’re generally going to match the way it’s available elsewhere.
In how many countries does Prime Video now have content partnerships and channels, and what’s your future outlook?
I love adding channels. I love adding even pay-per-view, where we are starting to get good events through some of our partners. In terms of where we are available right now, TVOD is in 25 countries, and I think we’re going to add at least that in 2026.
I can’t share details yet, but we are also going to launch Channels in a bunch of new countries over the next year. Changing distribution models is a strategic shift for any direct-to-consumer service or traditional distributor, and that comes with all sorts of perceived risks. And we feel really good about our ability to address those.
You mentioned that your deals are increasingly seen by content partners as a win-win. Tell me a bit more about why that’s the case!
One of the unspoken dynamics of distribution in a streaming world is that third-party devices are so fragmented, on the web, on mobile, in the living room. And in order to support a really significant content business, you need to be able to amortize your investment across the largest customer base. So, the work that we’ve done in building a distribution footprint over the years pays massive dividends. If you’re a new streaming service, this is one of the few ways that you can actually truly get global distribution on every single device.
So if you think you need to reach any possible customer for your service, Prime Video Channels gets you on those devices, and you don’t have to negotiate directly with those partners. You don’t have to do the tech work. You don’t deal with the customer service calls. It is a huge weight off the shoulders of a service trying to reach scale.
The integration in terms of how we actually drive subscribers for you, again, the reason you would do this is the distribution in support of what your ultimate business goals are. For a lot of partners, that is subscribers, subscriber revenue, advertising revenues and impressions, and reach. We match that goal with supply with one click. Purchasing via Prime Video is super easy. Most people already have credit cards on file, so it is seamless. We make it very easy to sign up. And we also make it very easy to cancel. And so the ability to get on every device, take signals of demand, and match that to our partners’ supply is one of the reasons you’ve seen more and more folks come to us. We can drive incremental scale for them outside of their [own] DTC offering.
So, it’s about subscriber growth and helping with user engagement? Or is one more important than the other?
The number of customers and depth of engagement are a really good reflection of the quality of the service that you’re putting forth. You can use that as a decent proxy for how compelling customers find your programming. And frequency [of usage] is a great indicator that you’re hitting a regular beat of compelling offerings. After all, we’re competing against all entertainment. It’s social media, Netflix, YouTube, and more.
Relative to the size of our investment, it is critical to get frequency and depth of engagement, and we feel really good about where we are on both of those right now. The depth of engagement, as you can imagine, is really critical when you move more into an ad-supported model.
Do you see any challenges with retaining and continuing partnerships?
I think all of those benefits have proven to be disproportionately valuable to partners such that you almost never hear of partners leaving Channels. There was a big one that then came back. But most of our existing partners add new territories.
Anything else you would like to highlight?
The streaming wars narrative, which I think is a little tired at this point, has in general been really focused on SVOD versus SVOD, Netflix versus us versus HBO Max, Disney+ and Paramount+. But what’s important is that we want to make sure that folks are super-educated and want to keep beating the drum about [one thing]: we are completely different from our competitors.
We do have a first-party SVOD service with original and exclusive movies and TV shows that we feel great about. But then we have this fantastic marketplace offering where we have HBO Max coming, free-to-air channels coming, we have Apple TV+.
If you just watched the Globes, you can go to Prime Video and go to The Pitt, Hacks, The White Lotus, The Last of Us, Pluribus, The Studio, Slow Horses, Severance, and they are sitting right next to Fallout, Beast Games, and more. That is a totally different comprehensive offering than people generally think of us, which is very narrowly focused on just the SVOD service. We want everyone to understand how critical this is to our strategy and how much we want to continue to grow it. That is super-important for us, and we know customers love it.