Amazon announced a significant addition to its on-demand video offering today in the form of Amazon Video Direct (AVD), which will provide a portal for anyone to upload their own clips and shows.
The new content will be made available to Prime subscribers in much the same way as the existing Amazon Video services are, but the company’s pushing hard to try and attract original content creators to the platform with a revenue sharing model.
Options for monetization for people who upload videos are varied, and you can choose a combination of royalties based on hours streamed by Prime members, a revenue share for rentals, purchases, monthly subscriptions, or ad impressions.
Clearly, the choice to share revenues with creators from the get-go puts it in direct rivalry with YouTube’s push towards a paid-offering, which is yet to be confirmed.
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However, whether or not it will scale to attract a similar number of both creators and viewers (creators aren’t going to persist in uploading content for long if they never get watched, and therefore money is never earned) is yet to be seen. It will need to if it Amazon wants to attract any of Google’s biggest YouTube stars.
For Amazon’s existing customers, it’s an interesting proposition – and just one more small reason to shell out that $99 each year. Add up all those small reasons and it starts to look like a pretty compelling option for a lot of people, however.
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