Amazon Freevee still ‘building out’ with no plan to cap channels

Amazon Freevee, the retail and tech giant’s FAST and AVOD service, is still at the stage of building out and scaling its content offering rather than setting a cap on the number of channels, according to Lisa Rousseau, head of Amazon Freevee UK.

Speaking at VOD Professional’s OTT Question Time Live event in London this week, Rousseau said that there was “a lot of opportunity to continue development and build selection” of the range of channels offered.

She said the industry had moved from having an idea of “very fixed windows” to acceptance and understanding of the opportunity of FAST, with a shift in the place in the content lifecycle where content could be brought into FAST.

She said that while Amazon Freevee in the US had about 400 channels, the UK offering stood at around 90, with a mix of third-party channels and first-party owned and originated content like Judy Justice.

Rousseau said that Amazon had identified an opportunity to bring high quality shows into the free world but also locally relevant content like Fifth Gear and Homes Under the Hammer in the UK.

She said this had given the programmer an opportunity to gauge how this content performed on FAST compared with AVOD.

On the relationship between FAST and AVOD, Rousseau cited the example of Neighbours, the Australian soap opera, where the platform released a selection of past seasons alongside a curated selection of some “iconic episodes”, making the series available on demand alongside two dedicated FAST channels that allowed Freevee to programme episodes and provide a lean-back experience for iconic episodes.

The launch of new seasons came first on-demand, followed up by putting episodes into one of the FAST channels, she said.

Rousseau said Amazon Freevee had worked hard on making the transition from linear to VOD as seamless as possible, as well as how EPGs can work in a personalised environment and looking at the value of concepts such as pop-up channels.

She said that users could discover shows in a number of different ways from the app, from Amazon Prime Video and from Amazon Fire TV, as well as via a scrollable EPG and personalisation-led discovery.