Amazon offering $10 credit to get Prime customers to stream videos

For its Prime customers who don’t dip into the streaming video library, Amazon has an offer to incentivize them to check it out.

The company is offering a $10 credit to use on Prime Day, which this year takes place on July 11. To get the money, Prime customers need to stream an Amazon Prime video on an eligible device for the first time ever on or before July 7. The video has to be from Prime. Videos purchased through Amazon or SVODs purchased through Amazon Channels don’t count.

Eligible devices include Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV stick, Roku, smart TVs, Blu-ray players, TiVo, Xbox or PlayStation.

Presumably, not all of Amazon Prime’s 80 million subscribers will be eligible for the deal since many have likely already streamed video from Amazon’s service. But the fact that Amazon is offering a deal like this suggests that there may be a fairly large portion of Prime customers who have yet to stream videos from Amazon.

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Amazon has other video services besides Prime Video. Its Amazon Channels a la carte SVOD hub recently expanded to the U.K. and Germany, and has continued to add new Amazon curated channels like Anime Strike. But Prime Video is Amazon’s primary video service, and Amazon is heavily investing in original and licensed content for the platform.

Late last year, Amazon confirmed that it was expanding availability for Amazon Prime Video to almost 200 countries worldwide. With that expansion, Amazon could end up sinking a lot more money into the content budget.

Jefferies Analyst Brian Fitzgerald estimated that Amazon’s video content budget for 2016 was between $4 billion and $5 billion, but that the cost of international expansion could drive that total up another $1 billion to $2 billion in 2017.

“That would bring AMZN's annual content expenditure in line with Netflix, which disclosed ~$6B content budget on P&L basis for 2017. AMZN management highlighted on the last earnings call that content was among the top three categories in which the company was, and planned to continue, investing. On the call, CFO Oslavsky said that ‘video content and marketing associated with that’ was nearly doubling Y/Y in 2H16,” Fitzgerald said in a research note.