Prime is an odd one though since nobody subscribes to Prime Video specifically, it’s a value add included with their Prime membership. Is it fair to compare that number to Netflix or Apple TV when they’re both stand alone products?

I know this is just for the US but just to clarify. The Prime Video included in your Prime subscription is only available in a few countries (US, DE, GB,...) all other countries have primevideo.com which is a stand-alone video only subscription.

I'm in India and we use primevideo.com. It does come as part of the Amazon Prime subscription.

That may be because Amazon Prime doesn't make sense in some countries. Example: Free two day delivery doesn't make sense if you can expect free/cheap next-day delivery from local webshops.

Other Amazon Prime benefits requires that Amazon have a local presence in your country or area, so it makes sense that it's limited to countries where Amazon at least have distribution centers.

Just to add to your comment, Amazon Prime also doesn't make sense in countries with a fairly poor Amazon presence / high shipping costs. E.g. Canada.

I'm in Canada (lower mainland) and have Prime. The free same/next day shipping makes it worth it for us. We don't order a ton, but probably 15-20 times per year is enough to justify it.

It also makes sense because primevideo.com looks like it was built from scratch and isn’t integrated in the “normal” Amazon.tld that’s not available in a lot of countries. It was very buggy in the beginning and incrementally got improved, they probably couldn’t move that fast if it was integrated into the main site too.

> Prime is an odd one though since nobody subscribes to Prime Video specifically

Speak for yourself. I live outside the US, and can't get any Amazon Prime or free delivery.

I subscribe to Amazon Prime Video for The Grand Tour and other Amazon exclusive video-content.

Yes, it's a small catalogue, but 4K Prime costs me 1/3 of what 1080p Netflix costs, so I'm OK with that.

Fair enough, I was actually unaware that you could subscribe to prime separately, but it makes sense. Either way, the GP did mention specifically "100 million US subscribers", in which case those are all people who get it for free with their Prime subscription, compared to Netflix who are people subscribing specifically for the content.

Netflix has 151 million subscribers https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-...

They may do what they did with a certain U2 album and automatically give all their users a free subscription for 3 months and then go - hey look we have all these subscribers. That way they could technically say they have millions of users of which, many will translate into subscribers. More so if they bundle in some other services and piggyback that, ala Amazon's approach with prime subscribers.

I'm always bothered by the "either/or" framing. Who only subscribes to a single streaming service? A trend I could set though (and I'm doing this myself) is the locust approach to streaming. You subscribe to a streaming service. Watch everything you want and then unsubscribe. Then you move on to the next and come back to each every few months or so. I don't think one more streaming service is gonna paint the envelope here.

> Who only subscribes to a single streaming service?

This was the whole attraction of Netflix - it was a single service that got you most of what you wanted. Now there's Netflix, Stan, Amazon, Disney Channel, etc.

A few do what you're describing here. One of our friends switches back and forth between Netflix and Stan every three months. But more and more of my friends who were perfectly happy to pay for 1-2 streaming services are going back to good old torrents because none of the streaming services offer a good value proposition any more.

Netflix really never had close to everything though. When it was discs, sure. The streaming though was always pretty sparse. I know I ended up frequently buying shows on Amazon. That's how I watched Breaking Bad, most Curb seasons, Better Call Saul, The Americans to make a few. To me what really changed is that there now are more shows than ever that are available with a subscription at all and more shows that are exclusive to a single streaming provider.

> But more and more of my friends who were perfectly happy to pay for 1-2 streaming services are going back to good old torrents because none of the streaming services offer a good value proposition any more.

I pay for both Amazon Prime and Netflix yet I find the value proposition of torrents better.

It happens quite often that I later on discover that some TvShow I'm watching through torrents is available in Amazon Prime. This is what happens when torrent websites have less Ads than services one pays for.

For torrents, I just download whole TvShows (all seasons), watch them, and that's it.

It has happened a couple of times that Netflix or Prime remove a TvShow while I'm in the middle of watching it, or that they have all seasons except for the last one.

Also, the Netflix app on the Apple TV is now super crippled. Netflix removed support to play to an Apple TV from an iphone earlier this year, etc.

The offer of TvShows, Movies, etc. in Amazon Prime sucks. You have to buy most of the stuff on top of the subscription, and when you do buy it, you still get Ads. The offer of Movies in Netflix is better, but kind of sucks as well. There are a lot of "Made by Netflix" movies that just prove that throwing money at a problem not always solves it.

I will probably continue to pay for Prime because of deliveries, but Netflix doesn't make much sense anymore. Our money would be better spent paying for something like HBO, or going out for dinner once per year.

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All in all, torrents don't break my balls. They are simpler and less annoying to use, work overall better, have a larger offer, I can watch them with bad connectivity after the fact (e.g. planes, trains, buses, etc.).

I'll gladly pay for a service that is as good as what I get for free. Hell, I'm paying for multiple services that are worse in many ways. We already have two Apple TV devices at home, if Apples' subscription service becomes better than Netflix, we will switch. Last time I checked, Apple's service was way worse than Netflix.

It is sad to compare all this mess with Music. I use spotify and soundcloud, and am very happy with both. I have Prime Music, never used it. Since I have spotify it has never occured to me to use torrents for music either.

> This was the whole attraction of Netflix

Yes, but everyone (including Netflix, analysts, and every observer with two brain cells to rub together) new that was temporary, and it started breaking down when Blockbuster started aggressively bidding for exclusives for their streaming service.

Netflix having everything was only going to happen as long as everyone else was standing back to see if Netflix could prove streaming a viable market worth competing for.

True, but sadly all Netflix proved was that streaming everything was a viable market, not that everyone streaming their own content on competing silos was a viable market. And now the pie is in too many slices and nobody wants to buy it.

> And now the pie is in too many slices and nobody wants to buy it.

And yet the total number and $ value of streaming subscriptions sold in the market is going up as more options emerge, not down.

Well yeah, the market is still expanding rapidly. That doesn't mean the value to each individual customer isn't diminishing.

But it can mean that and, in the case of Disney+ it does mean that. Content that was (and some still is) avaliale on Netflix UK will now be moved to Disney's new subscription platform. In this case, Netflix lost value for anyone that used to consume this content there.

With more subscriptions, they will steal or claim content from existing ones, effectively driving their value down. Sure some will create content, as they have been doing for a while now but that doesn't change the fact that if I want to watch The Office, I used to have to use a VPN to watch it through Netflix US, now it's on Amazon Prime but where will it be in 2 years?

Many, many people are currently paying $100+ for TV per month. I don’t see why they would stop just because it’s a few different websites now.

> This was the whole attraction of Netflix - it was a single service that got you most of what you wanted. Now there's Netflix, Stan, Amazon, Disney Channel, etc.

It wasn't. Netflix's selection was never, ever comprehensive, it just used to be focused a bit more tightly on 18 - 35 males than it is today.

And Netflix subscriptions never replaced other sources for the vast majority of their subscribers - the majority of Netflix subscribers in all major Western territories are also subscription satellite or cable subscribers.

Cable cutting was always a very, very minority pursuit, and HN is a massive bubble about it.

Switching frequently between service is exactly what the companies don't want. I agree that this might be where we're headed, but the idea of a subscription is to have a recurring and predictable stream of income.

The best solution for the content industry as a whole would be to set up a clearing house, that provides access to all movies and series, streaming services should then be able to purchase the content they want on their service. That would allow the services to compete on the quality of their service, not their catalog. Let's face it consumers don't care if Star Wars is created by Disney or Warner Bros or that Breaking Bad is distributed by Sony.

Given exclusivity is very provably a huge revenue driver any CEO who did such a thing would rightly get the sack immediately.

So, who gets to be this tollbooth for all content?

Much like Apple Music, Apple TV plus will leverage a large contingent of people who have no streaming TV subscription but do have iDevices.

Before the introduction of Apple Music it seemed like Spotify/Deezer/Tidal/Pandora/Google Music had the market divvied up pretty well, but because every time you tapped the 'Music' app your iPhone would nag you with 'would you like to try Apple Music?' a lot of people signed up, and Apple Music subscriber count shot up.

Did anyone think Tidal, Google Music, Pandora, Deezer has significant market share? Deezer and Pandora probably had a couple of million each. Combined they didn’t have that much. Pandora also wasn’t the same as it was just radio. Tidal hasn’t ever had many subscribers.

Spotify was the main and only thing around with MOG/Beats being a much smaller competitor alongside a few others like Napster/Rhapsody and Rdio before it went defunct.

This is unlike tv streaming which is more diversified and Apple can’t come in and give you everything like how it was with music.